Paper short abstract:

Operations produce political orders of circulation, expand capital's frontiers, and establish rhythms of contemporary life. The paper draws on research conducted in the Greek port of Piraeus - conceded to Chinese state enterprise - to ask how logistical operations cross relations of space and time.

Paper long abstract:

Do we live in the time of operations? From high frequency trading in finance to slow steaming in container shipping, automation in copper mining to meditation apps that on-sell our data, we are compelled to speed up and slow down at the same time. Distinguishing operations from practice and labor, this paper explores their capacity to produce political orders of circulation, expand capital's extractive frontiers, and establish the rhythms of contemporary life. Operations are both temporalized and temporalizing. They have a beginning and an end but also interact with their environments to generate temporal orders. Grasping how this tension materially constitutes operations means switching between the codes that shape their internal logics and the external force of their effectivity. The metaphor of the black box, prevalent in approaches that understand politics either as performance or event, confines operations to a zone where their deployment is masked by what they accomplish. By contrast, the technical understanding of operations found in software manuals and logistics handbooks fails to recognize the social activities, geophysical properties, and infrastructural conditions that make operations possible. Drawing on research conducted on the COSCO concession in the Greek port of Piraeus - often considered a 'dragon's head' of China's Belt and Road Initiative - I ask how the Korean-made terminal operating system installed in this facility shapes both turnover time and labor time. Software and infrastructure thus meet geopolitics, providing a hinge that allows investigation of how the production of space crosses the time of operations.

Paper short abstract:

China's critical left proffers a public sector and infrastructure-driven Polanyian substantive economy. Here 'ontological' substance unpacks into cultures of lineage, analogism and religion. This is explored in the logistics of infrastructure-based development of rural eco-tourism.

Paper long abstract:

China's 2000 year-long literati-based elites and Confucian culture has been displaced by a modernity of infrastructure-building engineers. China's left political critique of neoliberalism has shifted from a township and village enterprise socialist market notion of the 'commons' to a politics where (Pudong and Chongqing models) the public sector drives private sector development. This has meant infrastructure (roads, bridges, electricity grids, digital telecoms and finance) as driver. Thus China's 'new rural reconstruction', has again shifted from a politics of the commons to one of infrastructure. Here both commons and infrastructure have been formulated via Polanyi's and Arrighi's notions of the 'substantive economy'. But the notion of (both ancient and modern) substance is Western and 'ontological' (Jullien). When scrutinised, the substance of the substantive economy (Sahlins, Strathern) deconstructs into for example gift exchange and the religious. In China's case, perhaps into a 'totemism' of lineage and ancestors, and a cultural paradigm of analogy and mimesis (Descola, Benjamin). We are back full circle to Max Weber of verstehen and Historical institutional (not neo-institutional) economics. With China moving to a fully-fledged consumer economy, we look at the development of rural eco-tourism. This involves small business start-ups based in a logistics of migration and remittances. This is complemented by land rental, low interest loans through co-ops, peer-to-peer fintech software, and massive tourism infrastructure projects. To what extent is this - including One Belt One Road - a replay of Western neoliberal geopolitics? To what extent is this a culturally unpackable substantive economy?

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the plan to remake Colombia's Magdalena River as a logistics corridor. It focuses on how the smooth and uninterrupted flow of vessels and cargo along the river is secured, paying special attention to temporalities of speed and slowness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the project to return commercial navigation to the Magdalena River—Colombia's largest inland waterway and the primary artery of trade and travel between the Andean interior and the Caribbean coast from the colonial period to the 1950s. In 2014, the Colombian government approved US$1 billion to reestablish a permanently navigable channel and resuscitate shipping traffic; inspired by this vision, private investors have already spent even more on port terminals, storage facilities, and cargo ships. This paper zeros in on the plan's objective of turning the Magdalena River into a logistics corridor, focusing on how the smooth and uninterrupted flow of vessels and cargo along the river is secured against disruptions, obstacles, and delays. Paying special attention to temporalities of speed and slowness, it tracks the material and imaginary labor of "logistification" as well as the activities of the port operators and shipping companies already moving cargo along the river. Which actors, both human and nonhuman, and acts, both intentional and unintentional, are most threatening to the operation of the logistics corridor and what security protocols and technologies are used to manage them? How do the security problems that plagued ports and shipping in the past compare to those existing today? And what do these efforts to reconfigure the Magdalena River tell us about the place of logistics, infrastructural environments, and supply chain security within contemporary capitalism at large?

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how environmental imaginations are contested in the infrastructural devices and practices that mediate resource use, conservation and tourism in a community-based watershed management project in rural Belize.

Paper long abstract:

A global framework of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been pitched as a move away from visible concrete infrastructures of megaprojects and top-down national management, to decentralised governance at catchment level, with principles emphasising stakeholder participation, scientific data, and water as an economic good. It has been adopted in many places in Latin America; Belize enacted its IWR act in 2011. I explore the conjunction of devices and practices that mediate drinking water provision, conservation, tourism, and other concerns in a community-based watershed management project in rural Belize. What tangible and intangible infrastructures influence water practices for rural residents, and what are their spatial/temporal affordances? If we see logistics as provision of services by moving things (or ideas) from one place to another, many operations are at play here: piping potable water, monitoring water quality, harnessing ecosystem benefits, generating tourist income, enacting local governance, maintaining park boundaries, mobilising research grants… What happens when people contest the units of analysis and management, or the direction of travel?

Anthropologists have explored aquatic environments as infrastructure, whether enrolled as such through imposition of management plans (Carse) or as inherent features in multispecies assemblages (Morita). Here, a sub-watershed is bounded as a protected area, supplemented with pipes and tanks, and contested as a site for negotiating tourist preferences, environmental (and human) health, and environmental justice claims that exceed its boundaries. This paper examines the kinds of temporalities and environmental imaginaries that shape and emerge from attempts to debate and manage watershed logistics.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the changing geopolitics of spatialities and temporalities in the logics of global supply chains through a technical debate about the global trade of sustainable palm oil.

Paper long abstract:

A global supply chain rings of seamless travel of commodities across space and through time. The expert vernacular of "upstream" and "downstream" reinforce this idea of flow through actor-networks distributed across material and immaterial infrastructures predicated on the parameters of large-scale commodity exchange, efficiency and logics.

Following recent challenges to the "linearity" of such global supply chains (Neilson & Pritchard 2009) and calls to rethink global supply chains as "translation machines" (Tsing 2015), this paper will grapple with the spatial and temporal logics of a single supply chain scheme. My point of entry is a technical debate about a motion tabled in the Trade & Traceability Committee (RSPO) concerning "multi-sited Mass Balance certification". The formal logic of the Mass Balance supply chain scheme is that a certain amount of metric tons can be bought virtually as a certificate, which is allowed to be mixed with crude palm oil in the physical supply chain, as long as the same quantity, which was bought is also received at a given end. The paper seeks to understand the spatial and temporal debates, which this proposal released. The proposal was contested, but common to all actors was that the arguments advanced all referred to the logic of efficiency. This technical debate brings to the fore questions about the spatial and temporal logistics of the global trade in sustainable palm oil and perhaps more broadly the relationships between infrastructures that underpin resource use and imaginations of environmental sustainability.