‘The Road to Sudan, A Pipe Dream?’ Kenya’s New Infrastructural Dispensation in a Multipolar World (original) (raw)

African Dynamics in a Multipolar World, 2013

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation and this is explored through the analytic and political value of speed embedded in that nation-state's most recent development planning, "Vision 2030". The discussion of Kenya's new 'infrastructural dispensation' centers on a controversial new development project in the north of Kenya: the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transit Corridor (LAPSETT). The chapter theoretically draws on anthropological notions of 'friction' in the ethnography of globalization (Tsing 2006) and develops a complementary perspective on the acceleration of Kenya's infrastructural development through speed's implication for political transformation. Apart from these theoretical contributions, It is most intent on forwarding the idea that the recent concerns with 'multipolarity' in Africa's political economy would do well to be more explicitly historicized in any treatment of 'traditional' or 'non-traditional' sources of investment, taking care to evaluate rhetoric overburdened ideologically by the compelling spin of neo-liberalism's apologists. Keywords: Kenya's new infrastructural dispensation; LAPSETT; multipolar world; neo-liberalism; Sudan

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