Paper short abstract

The paper approaches reconstruction as a distinct modality of infrastructural power, using post-Gulf War Baghdad as a case study. Based on interviews and fieldwork, its shifts analysis from state narratives to the lived experiences of Iraqi experts involved in the reconstruction campaign.

Paper long abstract

The paper analyzes reconstruction as a specific modality of infrastructural power on the case study of Baghdad in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. While the stated objective of the US-led coalition was to force Iraq out of Kuwait and destroy its military potential, the aerial campaign decimated much of the country’s industrial base and civilian infrastructure. In April 1991, the Iraqi regime launched a large-scale reconstruction campaign which, under comprehensive international sanctions imposed in 1990, relied on domestic expertise and locally available materials. Reconstruction became a key instrument through which the Iraqi state sought to reassert control over the country weakened by wartime destruction, international sanctions, and the 1991 uprisings in the Shi’a south and Kurdish north. Echoing earlier periods when infrastructure provision and development functioned as a central source of state legitimacy, the rapid restoration of services was intended to demonstrate the state’s continued capacity to act as the primary provider for the population, as well as to signal defiance toward the international community. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival sources and extensive fieldwork in Baghdad, the paper examines the 1991-92 reconstruction campaign from the perspective of Iraqi engineers, architects and other technical experts involved in its implementation. The focus on their experiences allows to move beyond official narratives propagated in the Iraqi media and examine instead how “reconstruction power” was exercised in practice, revealing the challenges and constraints, as well as ingenuity and forms of agency that shaped the process on the ground.

Paper short abstract

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.

Paper short abstract

Analyses the proposed Messina Strait Bridge as speculative infrastructure that amplifies state power in Sicily—channeling finances, sidelining local voices, and reproducing internal colonialism through anticipatory governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the proposed construction of the Messina Strait Bridge as an infrastructural project through which the Italian state reasserts despotic and infrastructural power in contemporary Sicily. Long imagined as a symbol of national unity, technological prowess, and economic modernization, the bridge operates less as a solution to local mobility needs than as a speculative infrastructural fantasy sustained by developmentalist and technosolutionist imaginaries. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with rural and urban communities in northeastern Sicily, grassroots environmental movements, and cooperative food networks, the paper traces how the bridge materializes state authority through anticipatory governance: a future-oriented promise that suspends democratic deliberation while legitimizing extraordinary financial flows, land speculation, and ecological risk. The infrastructural state emerges here not as a neutral provider of connectivity, but as a coercive apparatus that bypasses local knowledge, marginalizes existing infrastructures, and reframes citizenry through compliance with national-scale imaginaries of progress. The Messina Bridge reveals how authoritarian tendencies are folded into democratic regimes through infrastructure, producing what residents describe as a permanent state of “attesa” (waiting), where public resources are continuously redirected toward megaprojects while everyday infrastructures—water systems, rural roads, agricultural support—remain neglected. By situating the bridge within Sicily’s longer history of internal colonialism and extractive governance, this paper contributes a Southern European perspective to debates on infrastructural power, showing how despotic state modalities are reproduced not only through violence, but through speculative infrastructures that reorder space, time, and political possibility in the name of development.

Paper short abstract

In the aftermath of 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes, exceptional rule is shaped through an infrastructural administration crystallized in the temporary container settlements and the sweeping state-led reconstruction.

Paper long abstract

Three years after the devastating 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes, the affected provinces of Turkey remain locked in profound spatial and social unsettlement. This paper argues that the exceptional political rule that emerged following the earthquakes takes place through a distinct infrastructural spatio-temporality. Initially characterized by a blurred boundary between state and society in the immediate aftermath, a new emergency-governance model soon crystallized, becoming most visible in the state-led reconstruction apparatus and in the temporary container settlements housing the displaced. For residents and much of the public bureaucracy, this condition produces a suspended everyday life marked by pervasive temporariness and ambiguity.

We demonstrate how, in the worst‑affected province of Hatay, an urban rent‑focused administration, centralized around the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, has overridden other public‑sector priorities. This proceeds in tandem with accumulation by dispossession and triggers a Bourdieusian conflict within the state, marginalizing civil servants in health, education, and local governance. The resulting earthquake infrastructure perpetuates a state of provisionality, wherein displaced residents live under indefinite temporary conditions that reproduce relations of dependence. Drawing on three months of fieldwork and semi‑structured interviews with officials, aid workers, and displaced residents, the paper ultimately contends that emergency infrastructure itself materializes the exceptional rule forged in the disaster's wake.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Egypt's authoritarian infrastructure boom transforms urban poverty into an artefact to be consumed. It argues that within broader patterns of militarised state capitalism, infrastructure functions as a technology for inscribing class hierarchies onto the urban fabric.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Egypt's authoritarian infrastructure boom transforms urban poverty into an artefact to be managed and consumed by the affluent. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between September 2024 and September 2025 in downtown Cairo, where gentrification schemes renovate belle époque facades while displacing residents, I trace the dual production of "Egypt" and "Masr": two spatially and socially segregated worlds emerging from the same infrastructural logic. The paper argues that megaproject urbanism under authoritarian rule generates a peculiar aesthetics of class polarisation, where poverty becomes simultaneously spectacle and scandal—framed in state media as a blight demanding eradication, yet rendered consumable by the affluent in their search for authenticity. I situate these dynamics within broader patterns of militarised state capitalism, where infrastructure functions not merely as development but as a technology for sorting people, inscribing class hierarchies onto the urban fabric, and foreclosing spaces of political assembly.

The paper contributes to anthropological debates on infrastructure and authoritarianism by foregrounding how megaprojects function as technologies of class polarisation. In dialogue with the panel's concern for decolonial counterstrategies, I conclude by attending to moments where this sorting falters: residents who resist evacuations, workers who display false 'authenticity' in jest to get money from those who wish to consume it, and the quiet persistence of forms of sociality that refuse the spatial grammar of the polarised city.