Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how Malagasy president Andry Rajoelina has used urban infrastructure projects to territorialise his political power and create a newly imagined ‘state space’. It argues that this territorialisation process represents a crucial step towards achieving authority and legitimacy.

Paper Abstract:

Like many African capital cities, Antananarivo’s recent development has been based on large-scale infrastructure projects. New housing, hospitals, schools, stadiums, transport infrastructure and a satellite city have materialised at a rapid pace in Antananarivo and its surroundings over the last decade. Those projects, framed as ‘presidential projects’, are designed and implemented by the highest echelons of the national government and its ruling party.

Drawing on recent works in urban political economy as well as anthropological and geographical approaches to the state, this paper explores how Malagasy president Andry Rajoelina has used urban infrastructure projects to territorialise his political power and create a newly imagined ‘state space’ in his image. I argue that this infrastructural territorialisation of presidential power represents a crucial step towards achieving authority and legitimacy. The paper shows how global discourses and imaginations of development as well as national narratives pertaining to royalty and sovereignty are intertwined and territorialised through urban infrastructure to claim political authority, creating a new mode of sovereignty. In doing so, I aim to provide an alternative perspective on the current infrastructure-led development trend in Africa and beyond, which tends to be analysed through the lens of policy mobilities and variegated processes of neoliberalisation, by focusing on the key role mega-infrastructure projects play in national and municipal politics.