Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the Rioni Valley Movement’s anti-dam protest that emerged in Georgia in 2020. It views the protest as a form of human infrastructure, serving as a communicative language for political sociality and a connective site in the context of left-behindness and post-social emptiness.

Paper long abstract:

In 2020, four residents of Rioni Valley laid the foundation for the largest environmental protests in post-Soviet Georgia. Two mothers and two sons, with the support of local people, gathered at the site of the planned Namakhvani dam project in the Rioni Valley, where a large orthodox cross was erected as a symbol of the anti-dam protest, marking the beginning of a continuous resistance for 554 days and nights.

The reference images of left-behind places brought by political and economic transformations can be traced in most post-socialist countries as a material and ideological result of capitalist development (Harvey 2006). Some authors describe those places as “emptiness” produced by capitalism after socialism and its subsequent abandonment (Dzenovska 2020). The dominant economic narrative sees remote areas as a host segment of large-scale projects “by assuming that peripheries are frontiers of empty space—uninhabited and ready to be exploited for the needs of global capital” (Gansauer et al. 2023).

The paper explores the formation of local forms of resistance in the “emptiness” through entangled social infrastructure, connections, and togetherness within the people and more than human worlds. By building on Lauren Berlant’s (2016) way of seeing infrastructure as the “living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure,” I argue that the protest itself became the human infrastructure for the troubling times (2016) - the infrastructure of sociality, by creating the space for the (self)formation of the political subjectivities of the subalterns and more-than-human worlds, otherwise excluded from the "political."