Short Abstract

This panel invites ethnographically informed contributions that consider infrastructural projects as sites of “everyday geopolitics”. We ask: what kind of affective responses, geopolitical tropes, flows of goods, people and ideas, and future imaginaries emerge through and around these projects?

Long Abstract

Around the globe we are witnessing the rapid construction of massive infrastructure projects from roads and railways to hydropower-stations and shiny new capital cities. The G20 Global Infrastructure Outlook report suggests that $94 trillion be spent on infrastructure projects to 2040. Yet whilst much work in anthropology has considered infrastructure as something states do for their citizens (Harvey and Knox 2015), surprisingly little analytical attention has been paid to the geopolitical aspects of these projects, many of which will continue to be funded and built by foreign states such as China, Brazil and Turkey. Existing ethnographic work on such projects primarily focuses on the mundane, everyday worlds and lives that emerge around them, including those of both Chinese migrant and local workers on China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Ethiopia (Driessen 2019) as well as those of Afghan transnational traders along global trade routes (Marsden 2021). How can we attend ethnographically to the geopolitical significance of these projects? What kinds of politics, subjects and futures do they produce?

This panel invites ethnographically informed contributions that consider infrastructural projects as sites of “everyday geopolitics” (Jansen 2009), in which power relations take shape and are continually re-negotiated by people. We ask: what kind of affective responses, geopolitical tropes, flows of goods, people and ideas, and future imaginaries emerge through and around these projects? Following the conference theme, we welcome contributions that consider these sites as spaces of entanglement, interconnection and possibility involving multiple actors across multiple scales.

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