Geopolitics, Infrastructure and Scale-Making in the Southern Gas Corridor

Abstract

ABSTRACT Like all infrastructure, geopolitical infrastructures tell important stories about particular intentions in physical form. Cross-border fossil gas pipelines that are built to promote interests that go beyond state borders and territories are considered geopolitical infrastructures par excellence. Taking to its ethnographic focus the Southern Gas Corridor, a fossil gas transit regime and logistical mega infrastructure recently completed between the Caspian Basin and the European Union, this article examines the twin processes of the infrastructuralisation of geopolitics and the geopoliticisation of infrastructure in this region. It advocates for a meso-level recalibration of theory-building and ethnographic scope to the roles of the elites, experts, professionals, transnational activists, local stakeholders and the political materiality of the infrastructure in cross-border governance, sovereignty and statecraft by transnational infrastructural means. It argues that, in the Southern Gas Corridor, the construction of the ‘geopolitical’ as a scale was achieved not in a top-down fashion but by deliberate efforts of its human and non-human agents and actors.