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- Convenors:
-
Bilge Firat
(University of Texas at El Paso)
Ferda Nur Demirci (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Andrea Weiss (Freelance Researcher)
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- Discussant:
-
Janine Wedel
(George Mason University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper 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
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.
Paper short abstract
This project examines how authority in China emerges within everyday life. Based on ethnography in Beichuan New County, it explores Tianxia as a logic of elastic, overlapping temporalities, showing how political belonging and legitimacy are co-constituted through circulating, relational practices.
Paper long abstract
This research investigates how the Chinese state is experienced, enacted, and legitimized through everyday moral and relational practices rather than through explicit institutional domination. Focusing on Beichuan New County—a centralized resettlement site established after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake—the study examines how post-disaster governance operates through symbolic inclusion, affective alignment, and what I term an ethics of placability: a mode of political integration that prioritizes accommodation, moral resonance, and relational continuity over coercion or ideological consensus.
Conceptually, the project reinterprets Tianxia as an empirical analytic rather than a civilizational ideal, emphasizing its elastic boundaries and capacity to absorb difference without fully resolving it. Methodologically, it employs long-term ethnographic dwelling, participant observation, and recursive interviewing to trace how kinship, memorialization, and everyday encounters with state practices produce a suspended space in which authority is neither fully internalized nor openly contested. By situating the state as a relational node activated through collective practice, this research offers a non-sovereign account of governance and advances anthropological understandings of legitimacy, morality, and state–society relations in contemporary China.