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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Ganghwa Island's Civilian Control Zone, this study explores how state security boundaries and infrastructures constrain residents' everyday lives, and examines how the meaning of risk is contested through residents' demands for Civilian Control Line adjustments.

Paper long abstract

This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2025 in the northern Ganghwa Island, within South Korea's Civilian Control Zone—commonly called the "border region"—and explores the competing risks of state power and residents' lives centered on security infrastructures. Since the 1953 Armistice Agreement, the state has defined North Korea as an existential risk, deploying surveillance and control infrastructures (fences, checkpoints, cameras, legal regulations) while restricting civilian entry and residence. However, residents experience these infrastructures not as protection but as constraint. State security discourse positions risk externally—beyond the Military Demarcation Line—justifying military infrastructures as risk mitigation mechanisms. In contrast, residents locate risk internally—within the border zone's control mechanisms themselves—and perceive that infrastructures meant to protect them from external threats produce vulnerabilities that threaten their livelihoods. The border region thus constitutes an exceptional space where restricted residence and mobility controls threaten livelihoods. Focusing on residents' demands for Civilian Control Line adjustment and checkpoint removal practices, this research traces how residents challenge state-defined boundaries, negotiate military control in everyday life, and reshape borders. By exploring competing risk logics and their material embodiments, this research illuminates the production of state sovereignty and exceptional spaces under South Korea's division system, and investigates how military infrastructures and residents reinforce and reconfigure boundaries between the logic of protection and the logic of exclusion.

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Paper short abstract

Russia's invasion of the neighboring Ukraine skyrocketed energy security to the world's agenda. By then, Europe had a few alternative sources/supply routes in the making for a few decades or in operation for a few years. Expertly negotiated, their geopolitical calculus involved cultural competence.

Paper long abstract

Few subjects have drawn more popular and academic interest over the past thirty years than the subject of energy security. Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, 70s oil shocks, and recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States and the European Union (EU) have sought energy security by developing competing strategies and projects to secure new sources of energy. Their energy journey went from coal and oil to nuclear, culminating in fossil gas, the most intricate due to technical, economic, and geopolitical challenges in its supply chain. Europe’s post-war industrialization led to a surge in energy demand. The European gas market saw a boom, dominated by a few companies wielding significant monopsony power. Forty-six fossil gas pipeline and LNG projects were proposed for Europe between 1991 and 2025, sourcing gas from afar, while a third of which were built. Geopolitical infrastructures par excellence (Firat 2025), each pipeline was a tool for gas market design in the hands of EU technocrats and company experts. Designed to mitigate (not eliminate) Europe’s growing demand for fossil gas (energy security) along with the purchasing power and access to affordable energy of the citizens of EU member states (economic security), in this paper, I argue that, regarding which pipeline project should be built and which others should be shelved, the geopolitical calculus played an important factor in their design and negotiation. Significantly, that geopolitical calculus involved more than the alignment of technical superiority, economic feasibility, and state prowess. It involved cultural competence by expert negotiators. 

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This paper follows a municipal waste crisis in a Palestinian town in Israel to show how garbage infrastructures become key sites of rent-seeking, protection and patronage. Waste reveals infrastructural state capture in which private accumulation and colonial violence are tightly entangled.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the Israeli settler colonial state becomes materially legible in the heaps of waste accumulating on the streets of Arraba, a Palestinian town in the Galilee. It follows the journey of newly elected mayor Ahmad Nassar as he seeks to restore waste collection, wrest control of tenders from criminal organizations and secure state protection, to reveal the colonial state as a material social relation.

Building on debates in the anthropology of the state, infrastructure and waste, the paper treats waste infrastructures as an ethnographic entry point into the relational making of the state. It shows how the indeterminate materiality of household waste enables rent extraction through violent protection rackets and their transformation into political patronage. Following the Arraba crisis, it traces how garbage collection and disposal link local contractors backed by crime families, large waste firms, landfill corporations, bureaucrats and politicians into a single tangle of relations, showing how the racialized margins are fastened to the colonial center.

By following Nassar’s attempts to reorganize waste provision outside entrenched circuits of profit, and showing how this experiment in infrastructural autonomy is violently curtailed, the paper recasts organized violence in Palestinian localities as central to the contemporary Israeli state form, rather than as its negation. The paper proposes the notion of infrastructural state capture to describe a configuration in which private and violent actors control material and social networks in ways that simultaneously enable private accumulation and reproduce Jewish supremacy.

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Based on interviews with Canadian broadcast meteorologists, this paper examines how atmospheric, bureaucratic, and media temporalities are synchronized through anticipation and improvisation. It shows how embodied expertise mediates uncertainty and shapes public communication of weather risk.

Paper long abstract

In this study, I focus on the temporalities of broadcast meteorological labour in Canada through interviews with meteorologists who produce daily forecasts and severe weather coverage under tight deadlines. I approach forecasting as a form of mediation in a public sphere shaped by uncertainty, risk, and contested authority. Building on anthropological and STS work on temporal infrastructures, and time as technique (Star 1999; Bear 2016) and on the politics of mediated time (Sharma 2014), I treat forecasting as the coordination of heterogeneous temporal regimes, from atmospheric dynamics and model update cycles to newsroom schedules and live broadcast timing.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with meteorologists from major television and news networks across Canada, I show how forecasts are continually adjusted in response to new data, editorial demands, and unfolding events. I argue that meteorological labour is a site where time is not only tracked but actively managed through practices of synchronization, anticipation, and improvisation (Adams et al. 2009). Whether deciding when to interrupt programming, how to communicate uncertainty, or how far ahead to project risk, forecasters rely on embodied expertise (Collins and Evans 2007) built from training, experience, and attunement to institutional and audience expectations.

By showing how time organizes labour, authority, and affect in everyday forecasting practice, I argue that broadcast meteorology plays a crucial role in holding together temporal worlds that might otherwise pull apart. I highlight temporal coordination as a key site where trust, expertise, and public orientation toward uncertain futures are negotiated under conditions of climatic volatility.

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Paper short abstract

Elephant translocation in Malaysia operates as a conservation infrastructure that redistributes risk and (in)security. As “government elephants,” translocated animals become living instruments of the state whose movements both stabilize boundaries and intensify exposure in borderland communities.

Paper long abstract

In Peninsular Malaysia, elephant translocation repurposes Cold War counterinsurgency-era infrastructures of mobility control and legibility for environmental governance, redistributing protection, exposure, risk, and (in)security across human and nonhuman populations. This paper examines how elephants deemed “rogue” in human-designated zones are tranquilized, trucked, GPS-collared, and relocated to protected habitat where they are said to “belong”—territories that Jahai communities in the Thai-Malaysian borderland, along with other Indigenous peoples, also call home.

In the aftermath of these translocations, Jahai interlocutors report being increasingly menaced by gajah kerajaan (“the government’s elephants”), which raid gardens and unsettle village life. These animals are distinguished from local herds with whom Jahai maintain long-standing interspecies protocols of avoidance and communication. Some Jahai speculate that these elephants come from zoos, noting their strange ease around humans, unlike familiar local herds that can be spoken to and warded off. Such distinctions reveal how conservation infrastructures produce elephants as instruments of governance: living infrastructural elements through which authorities seek to render risk legible and stabilize boundaries between safety and threat, wildness and settlement.

Yet elephants continually transgress the routes and partitions meant to contain them. Through their unpredictable mobility, the government's elephants become “rogue infrastructures” (Kim 2016), animate extensions of the conservation apparatus that expose the limits of such risk-based ordering and intensify the insecurities they are meant to mitigate. In foregrounding elephants as sites where protection and danger converge, the paper shows how conservation infrastructures do not simply manage uncertainty but actively participate in producing polarized landscapes of (in)security.