Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the Southern Gas Corridor, a natural gas transit regime and logistical mega infrastructure that was recently completed between the Caspian Basin and the European Union, this paper identifies various geopolitical agenda and scale-making projects this energy corridor is to facilitate.

Paper long abstract:

Geopolitics has arguably made a recent comeback. With the recent invasion and occupation of the Ukraine by the Russian Federation, the geopolitics of energy and energy infrastructures, such as natural gas pipelines, have attrached reinvigorated interest from the joint perspectives of imagining a climate-resilient and sustainable energy future and their logistics. As all infrastructure, energy transport infrastructures tell important political stories about particular intentions in physical form. Cross-border natural gas pipelines that are built to promote interests that go beyond state borders and territories are considered geopolitical infrastructures par excellence. Focusing on the Southern Gas Corridor, a natural gas transit regime and logistical infrastructure that was recently completed between the Caspian Basin and the European Union, this paper identifies various geopolitical agenda and scale-making projects this energy corridor is to facilitate. It argues for an anthropological approach to studies of geopolitics and logistical infrastructures by recalibrating theory-building and ethnographic scope to the future-making efforts of elite actors at the interstices of cross-border governance, sovereignty, and statecraft by transnational infrastructural means.