Capitalism and Infrastructural Ordering: (Re)Crafting of Statehood and Territorial Power

Bakonyi, Jutta; Darwich, May

Abstract

This chapter examines how capitalism is enabled by and anchored in the development and expansion of infrastructures. We show that infrastructures are more than just materials that enable movement. They facilitate the expansion of capitalist relations and provide crucial ordering mechanisms as they connect, direct and interrupt and hence shape how movements between people, things and societies unfold. We show how infrastructures are carving out state spaces from the wider capitalist relations, and that their dynamic evolves in the dialectic tension between materiality and mobility. While infrastructures enable the expansion and consolidation of statehood, and thus constitute boundaries through interruptions of movement, contemporary acceleration of mobilities also challenges and transforms these boundaries and spatial fixtures. Especially recent infrastructural booms in the Global South reveal how infrastructural dynamics challenge state-centred notions of territoriality and statehood, in what is revealed as a continuous process of crafting and recrafting of polities and societies.

Citation

Bakonyi, J., & Darwich, M. (in press). Capitalism and Infrastructural Ordering: (Re)Crafting of Statehood and Territorial Power. In H.-J. Bieling, T. Diez, R. Flemmer, & A. Futterer (Eds.), Transnational Infrastructures and the Transformation of Global Orders. Cham: Springer Nature

• Deposit Date: Jul 11, 2024
• Publisher: Springer Nature
• Book Title: Transnational Infrastructures and the Transformation of Global Orders
• Chapter Number: 02
• Keywords: Capitalism, infrastructure, statehood, territoriality, mobility
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2524811
• Contract Date: Jul 1, 2024