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Paper short abstract

Satellite bases contributing to planetary surveillance are commonly found in remote places. This paper explores the politics of the planetary rural through the solidarities that arise between those locally displaced and distantly surveilled, focusing on activism at Pine Gap in central Australia.

Paper long abstract

Remoteness is produced, not discovered (Ronström 2021). As such, remote places can be understood in terms of the presence of infrastructures around which remoteness is strategically maintained, not just as spaces of absence. Such sites. including signals intelligence bases, Earth stations, and launch sites, contribute to increasingly interlinked planetary surveillance and high-tech militarism. Their installation in locations optimized against various kinds of interference, moreover, requires the disruption of rural placeways, and in some cases, displacement of rural populations. This paper explores the insurgent rural socialities that arise against and in spite of such multiply-entangled facilities, drawing on digital ethnography and interviews with members of a settler-diasporic-indigenous coalition organizing against the Pine Gap intelligence facility in central Australia.

Pine Gap was constructed in 1966 without any consultation from local Arrernte communities, rupturing their access to important sites around a place known as Quiurnpa. It has become a critical node in the Five Eyes global intelligence infrastructure, using geosynchronous satellites to intercept vast amounts of data. Today, its surveillance of the occupied Palestinian territories is made available to the Israeli military, abetting their continuing genocide. In this paper, I first outline the contours of solidarity emerging against the base’s multiple complicities, illustrating a hybrid movement that resists binaristic constructions of cosmopolitanism / nativism. I next unpack the implications thereof on a politics of the “planetary rural” (Wang, Maye, & Woods 2023) which complicates the “frontier imaginings” (Prout & Howitt 2009) of remote places in settler states.