'To take over the world': Beyond infrastructure's normative invisibility (AAA2016) (original) (raw)
The Political Lives of Infrastructure
Radical History Review
This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histories of infrastructural power reveal if infrastructures are delinked from master narratives tying them to state and state-backed centralization? While development, nation building, and extraction are often state-sponsored or state-backed projects, the articles here demonstrate that modern states are not the only wielders of infrastructural power. Second, how does this decentering of the state in infrastructural analyses transform the stakes of radical political activity and the work of radical historical actors? In highlighting a different, ...
The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
Infrastructures and International Relations: A Critical Reflection on Materials and Mobilities
International Studies Review, 2024
In a world of accelerated movements, this article examines how infrastructures matter in international relations. We first show that the International Relations (IR) discipline has relegated infrastructures to the background of their studies and treated them as passive tools despite their forcible role in the establishment of the modern state system. By adopting a sociological definition of "the international," this article emphasizes the centrality of materials and mobilities in thinking about the international and calls for a novel infrastructural lens in the IR discipline. We argue that infrastructures provide crucial mechanisms for forging the distinctions between units that constitute the international as a separate realm. We outline how infrastructures continuously transform this realm through re-scaling and reordering spaces, polities, and people. In the meantime, infrastructures are at the heart of social processes, which generate knowledge practices that constitute the international. They inscribe themselves in discourses, produce meaning, and shape identities, and they are thus part of the ideational underpinning of the international. We conclude by advocating a shift in the analytical weight of materials in IR, premised on an interdisciplinary dialogue, and suggest a theoretical and methodological recalibration of the discipline's treatment of infrastructures. En el contexto actual de un mundo caracterizado por movimientos acelerados, este artículo examina la importancia que tienen las infraestructuras sobre las relaciones internacionales (RRII). En primer lugar, demostramos que la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales (RRII) ha relegado las infraestructuras a un segundo plano dentro de sus estudios y que las ha tratado como si fueran herramientas pasivas, a pesar de su importante papel en el establecimiento del sistema estatal moderno. Este artículo adopta una definición sociológica de "lo internacional", lo que nos permite enfatizar la centralidad de los materiales y de las movilidades en el pensamiento Author's note : We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their supportive comments and suggestions. Thanks to Oliver Belcher and Mohammadbagher Forough for their critical comments on earlier drafts of the article and to Shrey Kapoor for co-organizing the EISA sections on infrastructures and for our vivid discussions before, during, and after these workshops.
Modern Infrastructures through the Lens of Classical Sociology: Unpacking Ambiguities
Journal of Classical Sociology, 2025
Infrastructure-as a concept, word, and physical construct-is deeply intertwined with the shaping of modern societies. The term infrastructure emerged amidst the context of rapid societal changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, evolving from an initial specialized usage associated with railway development to a broader concept materially encapsulating "sociotechnical imaginaries of modernity". Therefore, an intriguing connection exists between the spread of the notion of "infrastructure" and the roots of sociology as a social science discipline that is worthy to explore. This article delves into the historicity of this concept in relation to classical sociological thought, focusing on the often-implicit notion that "modern" infrastructures developed to collectively organize and support social life on a given territory in enduring ways, indeed, to create "society". Through a historical-sociological approach, we closely look at specific trajectories of infrastructures of/in modernity and discuss the ambiguities that arise from tracing their historical developments and revisiting classical understandings in the present. Specifically, we focus on shifting world-regional dependencies, collective and individual tensions, and dynamics of rise and decline.
Theorising infrastructure (2019)
The politics of cycling Infrastructure, 2020
Draft chapter for Cox, P. and Koglin, T. (2020) The Politics of Cycling Infrastructure Bristol: Policy Press As a growing number of authors demonstrate, ‘infrastructure is never neutral and always inherently political’ (Nolte 2016, p. 441, compare McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008; Young and Keil, 2009). Moreover, as Sheller (2018, p. 97) argues, ‘The politics of infrastructure concerns the politics of mobility’. Infrastructures of all types, whether hard (as in material structures) or soft (as in skills and knowledge) are those systems that support action. Infrastructures for cycling are not limited to dedicated or designated cycleways but are inseparable from wider mobility infrastructures. Building cycling infrastructures is not just a matter of providing physical spaces, but also of building the skills, competencies and confidences required for moving in public spaces. If infrastructure is inherently political, then the ways in which different infrastructures permit some courses of action and deny others, how they route and reroute mobile practices, and how and what any given infrastructure makes possible, are matters of justice and injustice (Sheller, 2018). This chapter seeks to engage with a selected range of current theorisations of the politics of infrastructure, and to apply them to specific cases of cycle-specific infrastructures. It subsequently relates the ideas of social and spatial justice arising from these perspectives to bell hooks’ consideration of marginalisation, to consider how the patterns of marginalisation and mainstreaming revealed in the contributions to this volume might be understood through a lens of a critical and radical politics.
The Transnational State and the Infrastructure Push
New Political Economy, 2017
In 2010 the G20 in cooperation with major international organizations launched a comprehensive effort-here labelled the infrastructure push-to promote infrastructure investments around the world. Using selected transnationalised elements from historical materialism, this is explained as a transnational state initiative to secure general material conditions for capitalist growth in a manner that is profoundly shaped by power relations. The infrastructure problem was allowed to grow during neoliberalism because of the hegemony of finance; the push is a result of and reflects a weakening of finance and strengthening of industrial interests in the transnational power bloc, as well as a strengthening of the emerging economies. This potential hegemonic project has gained the support of the global labour movement, while also been subject to serious criticism from civil society organizations, speaking for the most vulnerable subaltern social forces. The empirical analysis also shows that the transnational state in this policy area works as a flexible, networked cooperation of G20 states and leading international organizations in ongoing dialogue with non-state actors, especially transnational business. In this cooperation, the international organizations have a relatively autonomous role in line with a historical materialist understanding of state apparatuses.
Review essay - recent publications in infrastructure studies
Review Essay, 2019
The edited volume is dead, long live the edited volume! While we continue to hear rumours about the imminent death of this publishing format, the three recent edited volumes in infrastructure studies prove that this particular form of knowledge infrastructure still has great potential. Two of them also prove that infrastructure has become a vibrant topic of conversation in the field of social anthropology over the past few years, even if the debate on the agency of things, systems and materials in neighbouring disciplines is a few decades older...
Infrastructure collective on dependence, disenchantment, and diversion
V!rus, 2021
Mobility infrastructures materialize the everyday life shared by hundreds ofmillions who live in Latin American urbanised areas. In other words, they exposeimportant disputes related to the notions of common and the practice ofcommoning as they articulate daily micropolitics and macropolitics at economic,cultural, and social levels. This paper discusses the constant and implicit REVISTA V!RUS V!RUS JOURNAL issn 2175-974x julho . july 2021 editorial editorial entrevista interview gora agora tapete carpet artigo nomads nomads paper projeto project expediente credits pr xima v!rus next v!rus construction of concepts around the idea of collectivity by taking into account boththe implementation and the daily use of infrastructures. This work outlines twotypes of project conventionally applied in Latin America, namely “hyper-mobility”and “hyper-immobility,” based especially on the realities identified in Rio de Janeiroand S o Paulo. We analyze notions of collectiveness that emerge from suchprojects: economic dependency, for the former, and disenchantment abouteveryday politics, for the latter. We discuss, then, the universal ideas of “goodurbanity” which are often understood as mandatory precedents for Latin Americanrealities. Finally, we propose a third kind of approach, labelled “hacking”, whichsuggests reinforcing existing collective diversion powers within the infrastructure’snodal spaces as a project for “spatial activism.”
Existential Provisions: The Technopolitics of Public Infrastructure
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2017
The paper provides a technopolitical analysis of public infrastructure by attending to the ways large technical systems became a political problem and how the development of infrastructure has inflected biopower, territoriality and security. It seeks to deepen the historical understanding of technopolitics by exploring the concept of Daseinsvorsorge (existential provision), which served as a crucial framework guiding public infrastructure provisions in Germany. Daseinsvorsorge provides a particularly revealing lens through which to examine questions of technopolitics, since it makes it possible to illuminate the dis/continuities in the government of infrastructure between three distinct political regimes: Nazi Germany, the post-war Federal-Republic, and contemporary Germany. The concept first became operative in post-war Germany, but it had emerged during the Third Reich in the work of Carl Schmitt’s disciple Ernst Forsthoff. Forsthoff identified steps towards Daseinsvorsorge in Nazi infrastructure planning, which was part and parcel of war mobilization, and borrowed tropes from the geopolitical imaginary of Nazi Germany like Lebensraum. After the war, Daseinsvorsorge aimed at establishing equal living conditions within Germany. With European integration and the privatization of infrastructure the norms and forms of Daseinsvorsorge eroded without vanishing, since they surface in modified ways in EU guidelines and in Critical Infrastructure Protection.
Interventions on Democratizing Infrastructure
Political Geography, 2021
This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregrounding and pluralising its material and temporal dimensions. At the same time, it speaks to a renewed centrality and relevance of infrastructure and infrastructural projects in political discourse. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically. Specifically, these contributions intervene in existing geographical debates by bringing to the fore four underexplored dimensions of democratic governance: (im)materiality, connectivity, performativity, and temporality. In doing so, it develops a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance.
Journal of Classical Sociology , 2025
The concept of "infrastructure" has become increasingly central in social sciences and sociological theory, recognized as a foundational element that underpins modern and contemporary societies. Given its growing significance, this Special Issue addresses the need to explore both the material and immaterial dimensions of infrastructures in relation to power and social dynamics. This introduction outlines the central points of each article, emphasizing their contributions to understanding how infrastructures influence societal inequalities, power relations, and ecological challenges as well as analyzing the role of the concept within classical sociological thought.
Large Scale Investments in Infrastructure : Competing Policy regimes to Control Connections
2016
This paper proposes to analyse implications of large-scale investments in physical infrastructure for social and environmental justice. While case studies on the global land rush and climate change have advanced our understanding of how large-scale investments in land, forests and water affect natural resources and social relationships especially in the global South, physical infrastructure – dams, railways, highways, etc. – which often accompanies the land rush has received little attention as a proper unit of study. We argue that in addition to the physical impacts that the infrastructure creates, such as environmental destruction or human displacement, we should pay attention to the concrete ‘infrastructure process’ by which the planning, implementation, management and uses of the infrastructure mobilises various, public, private, global, national and local, actors and often tacitly creates multiple and connected spaces of deliberations. Drawing on three infrastructure projects c...
Political infrastructure and the politics of infrastructure
Against the background of a highly conflictive urban situation, the paper focuses on the planning and implementation of the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR). Running from the west all the way to the east of the city, the JLR traverses and connects contested territory. While Palestinians and the international community consider East Jerusalem to be part of a future Palestinian state, Israel adheres to its claim to the whole city, a unified Jerusalem. It is to that end that the JLR was implemented and, as this paper argues, it can be seen as an important governance tool that not only serves the city's citizens and residents alike, but also works towards consolidating the Israeli authorities' claim to the whole city. Further, the paper discusses whether infrastructure is inherently political or if there is a 'politics of infrastructure' at stake in Jerusalem with regards to the JLR and its wider implications for the urban fabric. The paper suggests that much can be learned from major transport infrastructure in cities, not only for contested cities such as Jerusalem, but also ordinary cities, since infrastructure is always already part of the existing and emerging political power struggles in every city.