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Paper short abstract

This paper examines everyday infrastructures in Tropojë, Albania, showing how breakdown, repair, and anticipated projects tied to tourism and EU integration shape relationships to the state and suprastate bodies, and how trust and political expectation form through infrastructural experiences.

Paper long abstract

One evening last summer, 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. He laughed. “Business as usual.”

This paper situates such moments within the everyday infrastructural condition of Tropojë, Albania’s northeastern border region. Long marked by limited state investment and fiscal insolvency, the region remains poorly connected to the rest of Albania and subject to recurring power outages. Infrastructure here is encountered through breakdowns, informal repairs, and routine uncertainty, shaping how residents relate to the state and often producing skepticism toward its capacity.

At the same time, Tropojë has become a key site in Albania’s expanding tourism economy, where infrastructure is increasingly tied to state-led visions of development and EU integration. Proposed interventions—including a transnational railway corridor, a planned 600 MW wind farm, and road improvements—enter everyday life less as coherent plans than as unevenly materializing promises. Residents engage these projects through anticipation, hope, and doubt, drawing on past experiences of abandonment to interpret new infrastructural claims.

This paper examines how everyday encounters with infrastructural projects mediate relationships to the Albanian state and to suprastate bodies like the EU, and how trust, skepticism, and political expectation are formed through ordinary infrastructural experiences.