Paper short abstract:

Our paper scrutinizes logistical calculations and practices that aim at stabilising the circuits of containerised trade in the West African maritime domain. It thus traces the manifold practices of interconnection and explores how these produce forms of situated geopower.

Paper long abstract:

The major seaports of West Africa take centre stage in debates on the region's economic future. As strategic places of connection between the global North and the global South, their role is increasingly being negotiated in a geoeconomic rationale of interconnectivity among international organisations, national governments and firms: Interruption in one node is said to lead to interruption in adjacent nodes. Therefore, any interruption - whether through state actors at a national border or through pilfering, smuggling or terrorist activities - is calculated as a security risk to 'circulatory capitalism'. In contrast to past geopolitical discourses on anarchical spaces in an unruly world, it is now particularly the facilitation of 'legitimate' flows which comes to the fore.

In the sense of a critical geography of logistics, our contribution investigates logistical calculations and practices for stabilising containerised circuits. Against the backdrop of an ethnographic view from Tema port in Ghana, one of the biggest nodes for container traffic in West Africa, we trace practices of interconnection and explore how the micro-physics of governing maritime frontiers produce forms of situated geopower. Thus, we plead for a relational-materialist perspective, highlighting the diverse ways of standardising, connecting and sanitising engrained in such processes. From international codes and standards to specific control practices within port areas such as the collection of biometric data of employees or the installation of X-ray container scanners, manifold translocally linked and seemingly mundane technologies are now applied in order to address the problematised state of interconnection.