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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.