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- Convenors:
-
Elisabeth Kirtsoglou
(Durham University)
Antonis Vradis (University of St Andrews)
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- Discussant:
-
Yael Navaro
(University of Cambridge)
- Stream:
- Infrastructure
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 15 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel focuses on tangible and intangible infrastructures as non-unitary manifestations of state power. Through development,bordering, encampment-related infrastructures, policies and bureaucracies we discuss the state as an assemblage of often incoherent, (im)material spatiotemporal performances
Long Abstract:
This panel wishes to discuss the role of infrastructures in the materialisation of state power and violence. It follows recent theorisations of the state as a non-unitary array of practices and seeks to document the manner in which state presence and power are established through multiple and often contradictory and ambiguous performances. We call for papers that investigate tangible and intangible infrastructures as material, immaterial, institutional and/or affective manifestations of the emergence of the time and space of the state that produce and reinforce imaginary communities of citizens, but also conditions of non-citizenship, or partial citizenship. Our aim is to bring together papers that discuss examples of all kinds of development, gentrification, bordering and encampment-related infrastructures, but also rules, regulations and bureaucracies as intangible infrastructures. Through different cases that cross the boundaries between social anthropology and human geography we want to investigate the state as an assemblage of practices, materialities and policies that establish its spatiotemporal existence and legitimacy in a performative fashion. We are also interested in cases when the coherence of the state becomes elusive and oscillates between presence and absence, depending upon the faculties of hope, imagination and historicity, notions of the past or the future.
Key words: Infrastructures, state, material, immaterial, time, space, performance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 15 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The people of Lurucina hope that a border checkpoint connecting them to the neighbouring Greek Cypriot villages will 'revitalise' their encamped and dying village. In their struggle, they see power in really existing persons that they try to manipulate, conceptually disregarding the 'State.'
Paper long abstract:
The village of Lurucina was left in a 'frontier' location after the 1974 war that divided Cyprus; it stood far from the rest of the emergent 'northern Cyprus' and encamped by a militarised border that separated it from the surrounding Greek Cypriot territories. The social and economic relations that survived the previous decades of ethnic conflict were cut as the Turkish army declared the village a 'first-degree military zone' due to its 'sensitive location.' Furthermore, the 1974 war made obsolete the nearby highway that formerly connected Lurucina to the capital Nicosia and the port city of Larnaca, leaving only a lengthier dust road as the villagers' connection outside. After 1974, most villagers, except for some 300, left for other parts of north Cyprus and for abroad. Over the years, the remaining villagers organised alongside their 'diaspora' to pressure the Turkish Cypriot political elites and Turkish military authorities for infrastructure improvements and regulatory easements in order to help 'revitalise' the village. In my paper, I analyse the villagers' forlorn struggle for a nearby border checkpoint. Many villagers have little hope they will get a checkpoint and say their village is "destined to die." In analysing their desperate struggle, I argue that they live with an understanding of political power that conceptually disregards the 'State,' seeing it as incoherent, decentralised and epiphenomenal. Instead, they see power in various categories of persons that they pinpoint and attempt to manipulate, for example, to tolerate their 'illegal' crossings using the obsolete roads.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines debates about refugee protection in contested spaces and takes as a starting point of focus British Overseas territories in Cyprus. It analyses the entangled infrastructures of law, sovereignty, and humanitarianism.
Paper long abstract:
Looking at the case of refugee families stranded on the British bases in Cyprus since 1996, this paper wishes to interrogate the entanglement of protection and sovereignty in areas where both are contested. This entails examining also the entanglement of legal and material infrastructures in the form of case and international law, territory and land, and homes and services. One of the arguments of the paper is that as refugee protection becomes an increasingly complex area of knowledge, contested fields (spatial, legal, conceptual, etc), are becoming more relevant in allowing us to understand and counter-narrate this complexity. Looking at such cases of at the limits of the law and within exceptional sovereign arrangements, it is claimed, can be revealing about wider trends that have come to define the refugee regime. The paper wishes to engage ethnographic and legal insights with insights from geography in advancing this analysis. The case study in question further speaks to the entanglements between power dynamics in postcolonial, postconflict, and humanitarian settings and in so doing also speaks to the longue duree of refugeehood.
Paper short abstract:
Framed by and expanding the widespread perception that contemporary borders are vacillating and multiplying, scholarship in the field of borders and migration studies has cast its attention away from borderlines towards the assemblage of procedures and regulations, physical infrastructures and modular components that defines the social life of bodies and things in circulation.
Paper long abstract:
Framed by and expanding the widespread perception that contemporary borders are vacillating and multiplying, scholarship in the field of borders and migration studies has cast its attention away from borderlines towards the assemblage of procedures and regulations, physical infrastructures and modular components that defines the social life of bodies and things in circulation. In this logistical landscape, migration infrastructures, as tangible and intangible manifestations of state power aimed at taming mobility, become important loci in the articulation and conditioning of the spatialities and temporalities of human movement. Yet, conceptualising migration infrastructures exclusively as a functional by-product of the calculative logics that dis/enable human movement, seems inadequate to fully unpack their complex spatialities and temporalities. The paper addresses this inadequacy revealing instead their unstable ontology.
More specifically, the paper offers studies the everyday, place-specific and embodied dynamics that animate the social life of the “Extraordinary Reception Centres” set up in a central Italian province to host asylum seekers until their claim is resolved. It investigates how various histories and stories intersect, form and transform each other in the rooms of these hotels, schools, rural houses and apartments and, in so doing, it a) disentangles the uneven development dynamics that explain their existence, b) exposes their deep connections to the urban contexts and communities which surround them, and c) explains how they are differentially experienced by those inhabiting and exposed to them, engendering in turn diverse engagements. Migration infrastructures possess their own social life and, through an appreciation of the unstable ontology of this basic unit of research, the paper argues that these Centres renders state power and violence both concrete and unstable.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on state-outsourced emergency shelters for asylum seekers in France, I explore their (im)material conditions to understand current modalities of state presence and power. I suggest that the model of outsourced shelters allows for state ambiguity and contradiction in the business of asylum.
Paper long abstract:
Much scholarship on (im)material bordering infrastructures as diverse as detention centres (De Genoa and Peutz 2010), naturalization ceremonies (Mahzouz 2017) and job counselling for migrants (Del Percio 2017) has productively demonstrated the state to be incoherent and non-unitary, often fluctuating between presence and absence. Some have pointed to the embroilment of non-governmental players within processes and sites of bordering (e.g. Ticktin 2011). Yet few have examined the increasingly prevalent model of states outsourcing bordering infrastructures to non-governmental "operators."
My paper explores the French state's recent moves to outsource the social work of sheltering asylum seekers to non-governmental "operators," in a context of welfare-state dismantlement. In responding to state published "calls for tenders," non-governmental organizations with missions of social support vie to enter "markets" of social work structured by precepts of efficiency, austerity and competition.
Focusing on two outsourced emergency shelters for asylum seekers in France, I ask: what do the material and immaterial conditions of such shelters tell us about current modalities of state presence and power? Examining the overexploitation of saturated shelters and the ever-changing rules of operation and occupancy as operators negotiate access to rights and resources for problematic "Others," I suggest that the model of outsourced social work allows for state ambiguity and contradiction in the business of asylum. Pulled between their contractual relationship with the state and their social support mission, tail-end operators of the outsourcing state work by virtue of constant exceptions, leaving the rules—and borders of the nation-state—unchallenged.
Paper short abstract:
Studying a refugee reception facility in Luxembourg, we argue that the state is mainly 'present' through immaterial infrastructures, while the management of material infrastructures is outsourced. This ambiguous performance of state power places residents in a condition of partial citizenship.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the state is performed in a refugee reception facility in Luxembourg. It argues that despite being in charge of the facility and its residents' life, the state is mainly 'present' through immaterial infrastructures, while the management of all material or visible infrastructures is outsourced. It also discusses the effects on the conditions of citizenship for the residents of the facility. The paper is based on an on-going qualitative fieldwork involving mainly social workers and residents of the Diekirch reception facility, as well as local and central state representatives. This encampment-related infrastructure is made of assembled containers. The set-up and the maintenance of the containers, the distribution of food, the securitisation of the site are all outsourced to private companies. Even the everyday social assistance is provided by an NGO. Yet, the state remains always in the background as an intangible infrastructure. The state agency in charge of the reception of refugees sets the rules, such as how the waste has to be sorted, how many nights per month residents are allowed to sleep out of the facility, and so on. Social workers of the NGO and residents are constantly referring to this state agency when it comes to their daily working or living conditions, although the civil servants are absent from the site. This ambiguous performance of state power means that residents always feel the presence of the state, but can hardly face him in a direct manner to make their claims, placing them in a condition of partial citizenship.
Paper short abstract:
Why has the image of continuity and discontinuity captured the imagination of nationalism and its critics since the first articulations of the concept in the late 18th century? Why does a nation find itself in need of claiming uninterrupted and contiguous connections with an often-mythical past invoking medical metaphors of blood and why does antinationalist discourse rest on the refutation of such metaphors?
Paper long abstract:
Why has the image of continuity and discontinuity captured the imagination of nationalism and its critics since the first articulations of the concept in the late 18th century? Why does a nation find itself in need of claiming uninterrupted and contiguous connections with an often-mythical past invoking medical metaphors of blood and why does antinationalist discourse rest on the refutation of such metaphors? Continuity and discontinuity are invoked as processes of identity formation of the nation but not, necessarily, as the mechanics of the numinous infrastructure of the state. Although the importance of large infrastructural projects as statements of the state is visible in its symbolic imposition, be that the case of the Third Reich, the Third Greek Republic, the British Empire, or the French Republic, the small, unassuming and insignificant buildings that might be called the bureaucracy of material infrastructure carry the labour and weight of the state infrastructural apparatus without claiming an overt continuity of meaning and signification. What if blood as a metaphor is not the most apt metaphor for continuity? What if, rather than looking at blood as the paradigmatic metaphor for continuity, one trains one’s eye to the nervous system, to the nodes of Ranvier that show us that the interruptions of the protective myelin on the length of the neurons intensifies the action potential constituting a discontinuity that rather than impeding communication and connectivity accelerates it, thereby enabling the rapid travel of the action. In the cases that I am studying this action comprises the actions of the state that constitute its modalities of governance on the micro-level of the individual citizen. I am looking at buildings that have stood for over a century as places of confinement and exclusion even if the specifics of the confinement are not diachronically the same or contiguous. The examples that I use are the island of Leros, in Greece, where the same buildings have been used by successive and different states as barracks, rehabilitation schools, psychiatric hospital, exile camp for political prisoners, and migrant and refugee hotspot; the island of Goli Otok, off the Dalmatian coast, where the same buildings have been used as labor camp for Stalinists, exile camp royalists, and prison camp for criminal offenders; the death camp of Dachau which was originally a state-controlled munitions factory, a labor camp for unionists and communists, a concentration and extermination camp for Jewish and non-Jewish undesirables, and temporary housing for refugees from East Germany after partition.
Paper short abstract:
I analyse the material presence of a specific building, which has served as a cathartic infrastructural node in the past and today, as a transformative place for different kinds of citizens. I argue that its materiality reveals immaterial state infrastructures and the performance of its power.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides an analysis of Palazzo M ('M Palace'), a building erected in the shape of the letter 'M' in Latina, an Italian city. The evocative alphabetical shape was chosen in honour of Benito Mussolini. The whole town was, in fact, founded by the fascist regime on reclaimed marshland. Until the fall of the regime, the building housed the Casa del Fascio (the local branch of the National Fascist Party). It was, therefore, a pivotal node within the regime's ideological, political, and urban infrastructures of the city. Today, it houses the city's immigration office, even though little has changed in its architectural and aesthetic features. I focus on a common sight during my fieldwork: the long queues of migrants waiting to be admitted in the building. In doing so, I analyse this building as a multitemporal and cathartic infrastructural node, both for the fascist state and the contemporary state. Its materiality concretized state power and the infrastructures through which it was implemented. Today, state power is vicariously displayed through the presence and visibility of the migrants' bodies, as they navigate their (il)legal statuses through the state's bureaucratic infrastructures. By considering what is both (in)visible and what is present/absent, I inquire in this place's material existence as a transformative space, aimed at creating specific kinds of citizens (the fascist citizen then and the legal citizen today), through their passage through immaterial state's infrastructures.
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic study of the everyday practices of state officials this paper challenges the notion of the indolent bureaucrat by reflecting on the consequences of accountability practices made effective in the production and circulation of technologies such as documents and signatures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on an ethnographic study of the everyday practices of state officials charged with implementing the Indigenous Territorial Development Programme (PDTI) in the archipelago of Chiloé in Southern Chile. Specifically, I focus on how two distinct roles, that of the expert/technician and the state bureaucrat, are folded together in the working lives of those I refer to as 'field-level officials'. I argue that the obligation to account for their practices, and the expectation of their active participation in the production and circulation of bureaucratic technologies such as official documents, transforms members of extension teams in charge of providing technical support to indigenous farmers in rural areas into state bureaucrats.
I argue that official documents, those with the required signatures or stamps, act as socio-material devices with the ability to create, hinder or prevent the relocation of resources, the execution of projects and activities, and the generation of a paper trail that accounts for the work carried out by these officials. By focusing on the relationship between the officials and these bureaucratic technologies I argue against anthropological research mobilising notions of the indolent and indifferent bureaucrat: rather, this paper provides ethnographic evidence of an asymmetry of anxieties tilted towards the officials. I show how officials proactively allocate time and resources to gather, produce, officialise and mobilise documents, having to face obstacles and processes that, in the long run, will allow them to generate the trace of paper - evidence - that legitimises their continuity as state employees.