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Paper short abstract

The paper examines conflicted experiences of organising around the Movement to Save the Rioni Valley from damming, articulates opaque queerness (Blas 2018; Davis 2019; T. 2020), and argues for constantly (re)configured environments of South Caucasus.

Paper long abstract

Within the broader ‘project of transition’ (Barry and Gambino 2024) in the South Caucasus, smaller, variegated post-independence infrastructure projects accumulate alongside the post-post-Soviet decay (Bennett 2021). As a Soviet as well as a post-Soviet project, the Namakhvani dam is a continuous link between the two, demonstrating that projects and environmental struggles that resist them are a result of histories of colonialism, nationalism, and extractivism (Ocaklı and Ibele 2023; Rekhviashvili and Aroshvili 2025) rather than disparate and binary ideologies. Nonetheless, critiques of infrastructure projects in the South Caucasus center linear logics of development and modernity rooted in contemporary Liberal (Dis)Order. They advance extractivisms (Rekhviashvili and Aroshvili 2025) or social movements perspectives (Antadze and Gujaraidze 2021), both of which imply reproduction of a future-oriented environment and nation-state - assumptions often articulated through claims to ‘land-water’ (Gogua and Tsotsoria 2020).

The Namakhvani project was stopped, but the materialities of an unfinished project are tangible and decaying in a cut down forest, built tunnels, accumulated garbage, etc. Though they are othered as harmful to linear projections of/for post-Soviet futures, when taken together, these geographies showcase that they are constantly reconfigured. Situated there, the paper argues that through embodied queer relationality to altered landscapes, defamiliarisation, and “unbelonging” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), the environmental struggle of Namakhvani complicated, problematised, and laboured against static, binary visions of non/Soviet. It demonstrates the existence of opaque queerness in trans-socialist environments (Krёlex zentr, Pagulich, and Shchurko 2021) which accumulates with failure, ruin, and decay of unbounded (post)Soviet infrastructure (Silver 2021).