Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the Lamu Port construction as part of LAPSSET in Kenya, I discuss how mega-infrastructures function as infrastructural biopolitics - an infrastructure-based state intervention to capacitate its population to conduct themselves in ways that perpetuate specific forms of social power.

Paper long abstract:

I discuss how mega-infrastructures function as infrastructural biopolitics - an infrastructure-based state intervention to capacitate its population to conduct themselves in ways that perpetuate specific forms of social power. Focusing on the Lamu Port construction as a nodal point of LAPSSET in Kenya, I show how infrastructural biopolitics articulate conditions for a desirable life that, materially not yet present, are a deterred possibility of the future. At the same time, however, these infrastructural biopolitics disavow already limited possibilities of liveable life for the local fishermen of Lamu whose livelihoods are negatively impacted by the LAPSSET development. In this context, the local civil society mobilisation has resulted in the articulation of the fragile subject that is portrayed as needing the biopolitical care of the state. However, even if civil society's attempts to insert this subject into state's administrative apparatus is successful, due to the local elite competition over central state's resources and meanings of development unleashed by the favourable court ruling to provide fishermen with financial compensation, the fishermen are again displaced from the biopolitical machine of capacitation. As a result, the subject of care articulated by Save Lamu is constituted as a disavowed subject - it is both neglected by the state during the implementation of large-scale infrastructures, as well as is disavowed in the process of civil society struggles to constitute it as a subject needing biopolitical care and consideration.