Paper short abstract:

This paper examines infrastructural 'state effects' by focusing on local mayors in the conflict over planned high-speed railway in the Italian Alps. The analysis reveals a disorderly topology where hierarchy, scale, centre-periphery relations, inclusion and exclusion in 'the state' are contested.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the 'state effects' of a large-scale infrastructural project through a focus on local mayors entangled in the conflict over the planned transnational high-speed railway in the Italian Alpine Valley of Susa (Valsusa). I argue that this focus reveals a complex and dynamic topology of 'the state', against the grain of Foucauldian and Lefebvrian paradigms in thinking about 'state space'. The spatiality of contemporary governmentality has been described by anthropologists in terms of 'verticality' and 'encompassment'. Concurrently, the recent literature on infrastructures highlights the promise of road and railway systems to produce integrated and continuous state space. In contrast, the view from Valsusa suggests a much more disorderly political spatiality. Local residents have resisted the rail project for thirty years. The mayors of the thirty-nine municipalities in the valley have been caught up in the ambiguities of simultaneously representing 'the state' and internally divided constituencies. Some have chosen to collaborate with the central government, while others took part in protests, climbed barricades and faced the police while wearing their official insignia. Meanwhile, the government has redrawn the boundaries of local administrative units and manipulated the conditions of local institutions' inclusion in decision-making forums. Many local inhabitants, as well as the dissident mayors themselves, perceive this prolonged situation as 'the state fighting against the state'. What emerges from the analysis is a political space where hierarchy, scale, centre-periphery relations, inclusion and exclusion are all fought over and redefined through conflict, and 'the state' itself is a shape-shifter.