Paper short abstract:

It is widely acknowledged that infrastructure projects can greatly facilitate spatial transformation. By focusing on the LAPSSET transport corridor in northern Kenya, this paper explores how state officials justify the project and their changing depictions of northern Kenya and its population.

Paper long abstract:

One of the continent's most ambitious ongoing transport corridor project, the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET) is expected to drastically transform the landscape of northern Kenya- a territory considered a recalcitrant 'frontier' area by both colonial and postcolonial regimes, and governed through a state of exception for decades. The scope and potential implications of the corridor begs the question if and in what ways the government, donors and planners, deploy narratives that build on the very discursive practices mobilized by the colonial powers and, by doing so, justify non-participatory, authoritarian and exclusionary practices supposedly needed in the execution of large-scale infrastructure projects.

Whereas much of the justifications for opening up the region through the project echo past accounts that colonial administrators used when justifying investments in major infrastructures such as railway, the project has led to a significant shift in how state-officials portray the region. State-officials now depict the region as the next frontier for growth and acknowledge formerly derided sources of livelihood such as pastoralist economies as untapped or under-exploited.

Through archival work and a document analysis of colonial documents and official publications by the GoK, the paper identifies the ways in which colonial tropes as well as hegemonic concepts are deployed to frame both the area and communities in a way amenable to intervention. Such an understanding is important since it helps us understand not just the roles that state-officials ascribe to major infrastructure projects, but also how projects can play an instrumental role in nation-building aspirations.