Concrete approaches to peace: infrastructure as peacebuilding

Illegible infrastructures: Road building and the making of state-spaces in the Colombian Amazon

“…Although the role of roads as governmental technologies of surveillance and control has been variously emphasized (e.g. Fairhead, 1992; Masquelier, 2002; Selwyn, 2001; Wilson, 2004), an equally salient dimension of such infrastructures is concerned with how the state-space is constantly re-configured and re-imagined through the frictions, disruptions, and different forms of social engagement they produce (Bachmann and Schouten, 2018; Harvey, 2012; Harvey and Knox, 2015; Pasternak and Dafnos, 2018). In the following section, I look at such frictions and engagements through an ethnographic account of the San Francisco–Mocoa road project’s legibility policies.…”

Buffering State-making: Geopolitics in the Sudd Marshlands of South Sudan

“…A range of perspectives has theorized the intersections of space, power, and the physical properties of landscape, drawing attention to the ways in which projects of empire or nation-state making, historical and contemporary, attain form through the domestication of rough terrain, and these projects are often distinctively infrastructural in nature (i.e., Ahram 2015; Mukerji 2010). Geopolitical control from a centre is projected into rough hinterlands through what we have elsewhere called political engineering, or the reconfiguration of the natural environment to make it amenable to the projection of military and administrative control (Bachmann and Schouten 2018). Governing and policing typically hinge on legibility, standardization, simplification, predictability and channelling; abstract qualities that are often enforced through the built environment -in other words, by literally landscaping unruly ecologies.…”

Concrete Peace: Building Security through Infrastructure in Colombia

“…Regardless of the level of physical destruction wrought by warfare or the need for reconstruction, the building of roads, bridges, waterworks, and other infrastructures is now "one of the main ways in which peacebuilders aim to achieve their typically wide variety of highly political goals such as local security, the extension of state authority, and the restoration or establishment of the rule of law" (Bachmann and Schouten 2018:382). In contrast to conventional approaches to peacebuilding, which focus on good governance and free markets (Newman, Paris, and Richmond 2009), and alternative approaches, which emphasize grassroots initiatives and social development (Monk and Mundy 2014, Naucke 2017), Bachmann and Schouten argue that both states and non-state actors increasingly wield "infrastructural power" with the ultimate goal of engineering peace and stability (Bachmann andSchouten 2018:383, Reeves 2017). Over the last decade, a coalition of academics, policymakers, security experts, and private actors has been instrumental in cementing an infrastructural approach to peacebuilding in Colombia.…”