Abstract
Georgia, the post-Soviet republic in the South Caucasus, is undergoing its own logistics revolution. The government has pledged to complete by 2020 a spatial plan which aims to turn the country into a transit corridor for the New Silk Road. While this development is still underway, logistics zones - infrastructural hubs, free industrial zones (FIZ), manufacturing areas and malls - are emerging across the Georgian space. The New Silk Road initiative is promoting a perspective of a world without barriers, where logistics is not a means but an end: a world in which connectivity is productive in itself and where geopolitical reasoning has succumbed to geoeconomic calculations. This article aims at problematising this view by providing a grounded analysis of the workings of logistical spaces in Georgia, exploring the discourses, frictions and histories which engender capital accumulation within and beyond the Georgian space.
Highlights
The post-Soviet republic of Georgia is currently the recipient of large-scale infrastructural investments
Logistics entails far more than just the business of transporting commodities from one place to another; instead, it produces spaces, engendering new relations and spatial dynamics both locally and transnationally (Cowen, 2014; Easterling, 2014; Neilson, 2012)
Is it not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is today about to be covered by a network of railways? (Mackinder, 1904:434)
Summary
The post-Soviet republic of Georgia is currently the recipient of large-scale infrastructural investments. To understand the nature of the interaction between the ‘geopolitical social’ and the expansion of logistics and the territorial reorganisation which it engenders, it is necessary to look closely at the infrastructural investments which are composing this network, charting their relations to the socio-historical space in which they emerge, as well as their transnational ramifications Is it not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is today about to be covered by a network of railways? Commenting on the narratives concerning energy security and the threat of warfare in the region, Barry argues that ‘all of these accounts of the Caucasus should be viewed as elements of a broader historical system of geopolitical representation’ (Barry, 2013:37) Such a discursive system posits the different South Caucasian countries as part of a corridor granting access to and transportation of natural resources – mainly oil and gas – into Europe. Rather than a shift from one regime to another, as the BRI proponents predict, the establishment of logistics infrastructure across the New Silk Road is instead taking place in a complex social space where discourses of domination and collaboration coexist
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