Abstract and Outline
Convenor and Chair: Alessandro Rippa, LMU Munich, Germany
Discussant: Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, University of Bern, Switzerland
In the highlands of Asia, construction of roads, railways and airports in previously inaccessible and peripheral territories represents a major element of nation building. The Pamir Highway, for instance, was fundamental to Soviet governance in Central Asia. A similar argument can be made for the roads and railway connecting eastern China and the Tibet Autonomous Region. In Kashmir, roads and airports were for the most part the results of strategic considerations, and the role of the army in their construction, use and maintenance remains crucial. Today the strategic motivations for infrastructure construction are increasingly downplayed by the discourse of transnational connectivity in trade and development which transportation infrastructures, reportedly, automatically generate. Often brought under the umbrella of so-called “economic corridors” such massive infrastructures are, we are told by the proponents of such projects, means for commercial and cultural exchanges, not devices of securitisation. On the ground, such promises meet a harsh reality, in which infrastructures are conspicuous for their fragility and on-going disintegration. We argue that this intrinsic fragility of infrastructures, as well as the central role of maintenance should be more explicitly addressed, both empirically and conceptually. In this panel, we discuss the implications of such fragility in border regions, where infrastructures have for decades served as the main means of nation-building for border communities.
Conceptually, we contend that infrastructures should be analysed from within their social, material and political environments and entanglements. Construction is from the beginning accompanied by a parallel process of ruination, and maintenance often becomes the main way of engagement for the lowland state. Infrastructural fragility, it could be argued, both reflects the contentiousness of any nation- making process, while also providing the state with an opportunity to secure its presence across contested borderland spaces. A challenge, as well as an opportunity.
Papers in this panel will explore this contentious nexus, and discuss the following themes: • the ontological fragility of infrastructures and how it affects the maintenance of state materiality in the highlands of Asia; • ethnography-based case studies of the politics of maintenance; • what happens when different layers of ruins, often the result of different state interventions, co-exist in a particular space; • how are promises of peace, modernity and wealth discursively inscribed onto infrastructures and navigated vis-à-vis mundane experiences of disruption and decay.
The Longest Construction: Building and Shattering the Borderlands of the Pamir-Karakoram Till Mostowlansky, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
Between Permafrost and a Hard Place: Loss and Livelihoods Amidst Post-Soviet Infrastructural Decline Mia Bennett, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Coal Roads in Pakistan and the Contradictions of Modernity Mustafa Khan, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom
Boon and Bane: Fencing off Livelihoods in Ulaanbaatar’s Ger Districts Björn Reichhardt, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany
