Infrastructural Perspectives on Global Ordering: A Research Agenda on the Infrastructure-Orders-Nexus

Infrastructural transformation can stabilize relations between states, international regimes, firms, individuals, and the environment, but it can also contribute to their reconfiguration. To explore how infrastructural change (re)produces or transforms global orders, this article clarifies and disentangles the constitutive elements of what we call the infrastructure-orders-nexus. It views infrastructures (as socio-technical networks) and “global orders” (understood as multi-scalar constellations of patterns of practices, institutionalized norms, and distributions of material assets) as fundamentally relational: Processes of global ordering are characterized by inherent forms of connectivity and interaction, and driven by specific conflicts and negotiations over the planning, production, and operation of infrastructures. The article contributes to the socio-material grounding of an emerging “relational IR.” Drawing on Latin American transport initiatives, we identify four mechanisms—a corridor logic, financial conditionalities, a commodity imperative, and socio-ecological impact and resistance feedback loops—that specify how infrastructural processes reshape practices of cooperation, governance norms, and material asymmetries across scales. The broader research agenda outlined in this article links our heuristic framework to critical domains—climate (in)justice, extractivism and (de)colonialism, gendered inequalities, and post-anthropocentrism—calling for a reflexive understanding of the complex linkages between infrastructures and global orders.