Short Abstract

In times of rising authoritarianisms this panel seeks to understand the relationship between state’s despotic and infrastructural powers in infrastructure development through the lens of ethnography-based inquiries.

Long Abstract

Public imaginaries under capitalist modernity represent the modern state’s despotic and infrastructural powers as antithetical. This panel seeks for ethnographically rich interventions that would help us collectively problematize how authoritarianism, state violence, and infrastructure development may add to or facilitate the production of the state's despotic and/or infrastructural powers, state spaces, and the infrastructural state as a modality for governance across the Global South and the Global North. It further explores how infrastructures often function as mediums for defining and implementing new regimes of national citizenry. Another possible vantage point is how technosolutionism and developmentalist imaginaries in infrastructure development invigorate state power. Papers may approach these questions from any perspective or vantage point by examining financial and real asset accumulation strategies and/or speculative investment practices facilitated by state organs and institutions, social movements responding to vibrations of the authoritarian-democratic rule, and sense- and world-making among the lay, epistemic, expert and other communities. Given the current post-globalist moment we live in, and very much in line with EASA 2026’s overarching theme of contemplations of ‘Possibilities in a Polarised World’, this panel aims to provide a timely platform to rethink the role of infrastructures in imagining state power at various scales and the making of the infrastructural state as a historical construct, prefiguring democracy’s contentions with anticipatory politics.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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