Infrastructural Imperialism

In places as far-flung as Addis Ababa and Astana, Dakar and Dushanbe, high-speed railways and shiny new city centers promise to boost economies and give residents a better life, as well as boost a nation's position in geopolitical hierarchies. However, it is often ambitious powers such as China, Russia, and Turkey that fund and build these new futures, employing infrastructural largesse to showcase their own generosity and greatness. This review asks what anthropologists might gain from rescaling our study of infrastructures to see them as geopolitical sites that materialize new global imaginaries and become the scaffolding for new forms of power. The aim is to show how infrastructure can constitute the basis of an ethnographic and materialist geopolitics, one that allows us to elucidate the geopolitical imaginaries that shape our interlocutors’ lives while not ignoring the global political economic forces that structure those imaginaries.