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- Convenors:
-
Giorgi Cheishvili
(Utrecht University)
Manon-Julie Borel (University of Bern)
Rozafa Berisha (Utrecht University)
Joseph Buckley (Utrecht University)
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- Discussant:
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Rebecca Bryant
(Utrecht University)
- Formats:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Bringing insights from Georgia, Kosovo and Uzbekistan, this paper examines the contemporary ‘infrastructural imperialism’ of the Turkish state through the lens of everyday geopolitics. In so doing, we offer three novel analytical concepts – infra-imaginaries, infra-power and infra-subjectivities.
Paper long abstract
In former European empires, colonial powers developed infrastructure in metropolitan centers through the extraction of resources. What we observe today is a different configuration: rising economic powers increasingly build infrastructure in other states as a means of projecting influence and creating forms of soft power. This has been termed ‘infrastructural imperialism’ (Bryant, forthcoming).
This paper focuses on the infrastructural imperialism of Turkey, through both state and non-state actors, drawing on ethnographic insights from Georgia, Kosovo, and Uzbekistan. Located along the Eurasian corridor and shaped by overlapping geopolitical influences, these three cases offer an important vantagepoint from which to analyse contemporary infrastructural imperialism through the lens of everyday geopolitics, that is, the ways geopolitical imaginaries and tropes operate in daily life, and how everyday practices contribute to the construction of the geopolitical.
We do this through a threefold analytical framework. First, we analyse infra-imaginaries, or how infrastructure projects generate new visions of (global) futures and reconfigure imaginaries of the global distribution of power. Second, we examine infra-power, in which overt forms of extraction are replaced by relationships framed as equal, fraternal, or mutually beneficial. Third, we explore infra-subjectivities, or new forms of political subjectivity that are produced through and in relation to infrastructure. Through these frameworks, we aim to scale up anthropological analyses of infrastructure to the level of geopolitical and imperial formations.
Paper short abstract
How are internationally driven visions of modern and green futures lived through everyday infrastructure? Through mobile ethnography in HCMC public buses, this paper traces how geopolitics unfolds through rhythm, affect, and everyday infrastructural labour.
Paper long abstract
Buses, as mobile infrastructural sites, are entangled with geopolitical ambitions of net-zero commitments and economic assertation. In Ho Chi Minh City, public bus system materialises these ambitions through electrification policies, public-private tendering, and discourses of a "modern" and "civilised" city, translating international climate promises and national developmental imaginaries into everyday urban circulation.
Drawing on eighteen months of mobile ethnography with bus workers, this paper approaches buses as a site of everyday geopolitics, where global agendas, state governance, and corporate infrastructures are felt through embodied labour. Combining Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis with Foucauldian dispositif, the study traces how discourses of progress and efficiency are absorbed into workers' bodily and affective rhythms, producing temporal endurance and uncertainty alongside tactical practices of cooperation.
While officially framed as a green and efficient solution to city moving, the bus system relies on precarious labour and "informal" cooperation between workers and roadside vendors to maintain circulation under constrained temporal regimes. These interactions reveal how infrastructural geopolitics is sustained through not only policy, but also mundane acts of coordination between various actors.
The paper argues that visions of a modern future are produced convergently in everyday encounters between bus workers, private operators, and state authorities. Rather than being positioned simply as subjects of domination or resistance, workers often adapt to and reproduce developmental imaginaries even as infrastructural restructuring threatens their livelihoods. Attending ethnographically to affect, rhythm, and uncertainty reveals how geopolitics unfolds through everyday infrastructure, where future hope emerges as a relational condition in an ascending Asian mega-urban context.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how infrastructure in Tropojë, Albania mediates everyday geopolitics, showing how various infrastructural projects tied to tourism and EU integration shape competing expectations, skepticism, and relations to the state amid chronic infrastructural breakdown.
Paper long abstract
One summer evening, while sipping raki at his hotel above Tropojë, Gary, a close interlocutor, showed me a computer-generated rendering of the proposed “Red and Black” railway. The animation traced a route from Shkodër, through tunnels to Komani Lake, and onward across Kosovo to Prishtina. “This will solve all our problems,” he said. Less than an hour later, the electricity cut out, plunging the town below into darkness. Gary laughed. “Business as usual.”
This paper situates such moments within the infrastructural condition of Tropojë, Albania’s northeastern border region, where infrastructure has become a key site through which geopolitics is encountered in everyday life. Long marked by state neglect and fiscal insolvency, the region remains poorly connected to the rest of Albania and subject to frequent power outages, despite its importance to national hydropower production. At the same time, Tropojë has emerged as a strategic site in Albania’s expanding tourism economy, central to state narratives of EU integration.
Against this backdrop, proposed infrastructural interventions—including a transnational railway corridor, a planned 600 MW wind farm, and road improvements—mediate competing geopolitical imaginaries. Locally, these projects are discussed not only as technical solutions but as signs of European alignment and long-awaited inclusion. Yet they also generate skepticism, as residents weigh promises of mobility and investment against concerns about corruption, ecological risk, and the credibility of state and EU-facing claims.
Rather than treating geopolitics as distant or abstract, this paper explores how it becomes performative and mundane, negotiated through infrastructural anticipation, breakdown, and everyday uncertainty.
Paper short abstract
Through ethnography of distribution of electricity, the paper looks at the role of China’s Belt and Road Initiative projects as well as the role of international financial institutions that have turned electricity infrastructure into a site of ‘geopolitics’ in Pakistan.
Paper long abstract
Power outages are an everyday experience in Sindh, in the Southern region of Pakistan. In the summer months, with temperatures touching 50 C, power outages have a violent effect on one's everyday existence. Infrastructure of electricity in Pakistan has been shaped by the privatisation reforms, initiated by the World Bank in the 1990s. In the past three decades, for a large majority of the people in the country, electricity is experienced only with interruptions and disruptions. In such a context, the ‘presence’ not the absence brings the shock (Gupta, 2015). In 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative projects, were promoted by the Pakistani state to end the visceral effects of power outages.
Through ethnographic engagement of everyday distribution of electricity and analysis of privatisation reforms from the 1990s, the paper examines the electricity infrastructure which has become a site of ‘everyday geopolitics’ between the Pakistani state, the local and the international private corporations. I show how electricity outages, the theft of electricity, and protests against the rising bills are everyday negotiations between consumers of electricity and the entangled world of producers of electricity. Unlike other BRI projects in Pakistan, where geopolitical consideration of the project is shaped between two states, electricity infrastructure involves multiple actors and the results are shaped by truly entangled geopolitical relations.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how an in-the-making infrastructural megaproject, namely “Canal Istanbul and the New City,” produces everyday geopolitics of New Turkey by activating speculative futures and geopolitical imaginaries among local residents, activists, and real estate actors.
Paper long abstract
This paper focuses on an in-the-making infrastructural urban megaproject in Istanbul, namely the Canal Istanbul and New City project. This project foresees a new mega waterway in Istanbul for international maritime trade, along with an extensive urban development in the hinterlands of the Canal. The paper examines how this in-the-making project produces the everyday geopolitics of New Turkey—a vision advanced by the ruling party over the past decade and framed through neo-Ottomanist references to Istanbul as the heartland of a presumed empire. I investigate how everyday experiences of waiting for this infrastructural megaproject open up a dynamic terrain in which diverse actors (local residents, real estate agents, activists) navigate the speculative present and actively construct geopolitical imaginaries and futures. The study brings insights from the anthropology of future into dialogue with the literature on everyday geopolitics in order to illuminate the processes through which geopolitics is made from below. Methodologically, I propose an ethnographic design including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis. Fieldwork will begin in one of the areas most frequently cited in media coverage as being highly affected by the project. The initial focus on residents of this location will be extended to other nearby villages and neighborhoods as the research progresses, as well as to other relevant actors across the wider region and Istanbul, including activists, real estate agents at multiple scales, and, where possible, officials and bureaucrats.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the "Canal of Dignity”, a peasant-built irrigation canal on the Haitian–Dominican border, as a site of everyday geopolitics. Drawing on ethnography, it shows how transnational solidarities around small-scale infrastructure rework geopolitical structures of exclusion from below
Paper long abstract
In September 2023, tensions escalated between the Dominican Republic and Haiti over the construction of an irrigation canal on the border river Río Masacre. Initiated by peasants in Haiti’s Wanament region, the small-scale project emerged as a grassroots response to prolonged drought and worsening food insecurity. Confronted with decades of unmet state promises, local agricultural producers mobilized autonomously to secure their livelihoods.
The Dominican government opposed the canal, framing it as a violation of a binational treaty. Its response included border closures, the suspension of residency permits, and the intensification of violent deportations of Haitians. Despite an appeal to the United Nations General Assembly the international community refrained from intervening.
In a critique of this anti-Haitian politics and the international community's indifference, the project was named 'The Canal of Dignity', emphasizing claims to human dignity and self-determination. Resonating with the widespread experience of dehumanisation and political marginalisation, Haitians both in Haiti and in the diaspora came together in a transnational movement to support the project, which was perceived as a “Second Haitian Revolution”. Much to the surprise of international observers, the canal was completed within 10 months.
Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper examines the Canal of Dignity as a site of everyday geopolitics, where infrastructural labor becomes a vehicle for renegotiating sovereignty and exclusion from below. While oriented toward agricultural survival amid overlapping crises, the canal also generated affective solidarities that transcended national borders, challenging entrenched geopolitical hierarchies rooted in Haiti’s revolutionary past and enduring racialized marginalization.
Paper short abstract
“Silicon Saxony” is Europe’s largest chip cluster, promising regional renewal and European digital sovereignty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the North of Dresden, our contribution details how the geopolitical infrastructures of semiconductor production come to bear in local settings.
Paper long abstract
On the outskirts of the German city Dresden lies one of the largest chip production clusters in Europe: “Silicon Saxony” encompasses a network of semiconductor fabs, research facilities and suppliers that promise not only a high-tech future for a region marred by post-socialist de-industrialization, political discontent and the rise of the far-right. It is also supposed to guarantee Europe’s “digital sovereignty”, safeguarding the production of semiconductors from US-China rivalry and supply chain disruptions. The cluster constitutes an “operative space” in a shifting architecture of geopolitical power (Mezzadra and Neilson 2024). Its current expansion demands large political, financial and infrastructural interventions: laying powerlines through private backyards, routing sewage pipes through a nature reserve, building houses for migrant workers and dispersing large sums of state subsidies.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the North of Dresden, our contribution details how the geopolitical infrastructures of semiconductor production come to bear in local settings. It reflects on the absence of visible protest and surveys the multiplicity of discourses on the cluster, ranging from the need for a new community swimming pool to the stakes of a new cold war fought by means of microchips. It recounts conflicting imaginaries, histories and futures – from the semiconductor industry in the former GDR to the promise of a “Silicon Saxony”. The questions that emerge concern the place of geopolitics in quotidian lives, sense-making and political struggles – how and where can the geopolitics of infrastructural projects be studied, when they appear to elude the scales of everyday life?
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in northern Pakistan, this paper examines how media and public discourse about the Belt and Road Initiative as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, produces everyday geopolitics through hospitality and speculative practices oriented toward the future.
Paper long abstract
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a flagship component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), envisioned as a network of transport, energy, and digital infrastructures linking western China to the Arabian Sea. In Pakistan’s northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan—a constitutionally liminal territory shaped by unresolved sovereignty claims—CPEC has generated powerful future-oriented imaginaries well before many projects have materially arrived. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among family-run guest houses, upscale resorts, freelancers, artists, and state-affiliated communication authorities, this paper approaches tourism infrastructure as a site of everyday geopolitics. It traces how roads, internet connectivity, booking platforms, surveillance technologies, and architectural aesthetics become tools through which residents anticipate increased tourist influxes, assert legitimacy, and recalibrate their relationships to the Pakistani state, China, and global publics.
I argue that tourism functions as an infrastructural imaginary: a domain where uninterrupted electricity, reliable internet, hygiene standards, CCTV surveillance, and digital visibility operate as signs of readiness for participation in global circuits of ongoing and future mobility. These infrastructures generate affective responses—hope, anxiety, aspiration, and scepticism—as people invest in futures framed by CPEC discourses of connectivity and development. At the same time, platforms such as Booking.com, Instagram, and Google Reviews expose local actors to uneven regimes of visibility and accountability, producing new forms of regulation beyond the state.
By foregrounding tourism infrastructure as everyday geopolitics, this paper shows how global geopolitical projects are lived in advance of their completion, shaping social relations, moral claims, and future-making in Gilgit Baltistan.