Infrastructuring Eurasia: Between Georgian dreams and a Jana Qazaqstan

Abstract

This talk takes linear views on the BRI as both mystical and alarmist down to earth, and lays bare the initiative’s relational and shapeshifting nature in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Through an analytical gaze informed by the interdisciplines of critical geography, anthropology of infrastructure and political economy, the contribution grounds and demystifies the ‘giant’ in two specific geographical sites and political contexts along the Middle Corridor: (1) the re/construction of the 51 km of the Rikoti Highway in Georgia, literally constituting the Corridor, and (2) the 100 MW Zhanatas Wind Park in Qazaqstan, the largest to date in Central Asia. Situating the initiative in the contemporary global infrastructural push and concomitant developmental narratives, the talk goes beyond a wholesale treatment of the BRI as exceptional and associated infrastructure projects as mere material products. Mobilising infrastructure as a processual analytic allows for dissembling infrastructures into actors, agendas and agencies that pull and push against infrastructures in different design, implementation and operation phases. Approaching infrastructures as sociomaterial processes, within and beyond the BRI, tends to their genealogies in specific political economies while capturing their evolution in line with shifting (geo)political relations, global development paradigms, market dynamics, diversified financial flows and technical infrastructure. Beyond the poetical promises of connected and clean futures, the BRI infrastructures speak to translocal paradoxes and grievances associated with large-scale infrastructures.