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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.