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Paper short abstract

This panel examines how geopolitical fragmentation is reshaping mobility, logistics, and infrastructure across the Global South. It highlights how Southern actors navigate shifting power relations, sustainability agendas, and emerging forms of agency amid global uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Geopolitical fragmentation is transforming the material and political landscapes of mobility and infrastructure across the Global South. As global power relations fracture through conflicts, sanctions, supply-chain reconfigurations, and competing visions of “green” connectivity, the very foundations of sustainable mobility are being redrawn. This panel examines how these global shifts are reshaping infrastructures of movement, the governance of logistics, and the agency of Southern actors in navigating uncertain development futures.

Sustainable mobility and logistics have long been framed as pathways toward inclusive, low-carbon growth. Yet in an era of competing trade blocs, contested digital standards, and fragmented climate regimes, transport and infrastructure projects increasingly reflect geopolitical realignments rather than shared sustainability goals. From China’s Belt and Road corridors to Western “green infrastructure” initiatives, the Global South has become a terrain of infrastructural rivalry, strategic dependencies, and new forms of agency.

We invite contributions that interrogate how states, cities, and communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America reinterpret mobility and connectivity amid global uncertainty. How do local actors leverage fragmentation to assert autonomy or resilience? What new geographies of logistics, energy transition, and trade are emerging from these tensions?

By foregrounding the agency of Southern actors within fractured global systems, this panel reimagines development as a plural, contested, and uncertain process, one that is being actively reshaped through the politics of mobility and infrastructure.