Politics of circulation: The makings of the Berbera corridor in Somali East Africa

Abstract

This article explores the co-production of political order and circulation in what today is known as Berbera corridor, a trade and transport corridor that connects landlocked Ethiopia and Berbera Port in the breakaway Republic of Somaliland. We analyse the ‘politics of circulation’ that are set in motion by the articulation of different projects of making goods circulate and capturing revenue from circulation. Such politics involve a plurality of rationalities, the emergence of technologies that seek to balance circulation and security, and substantial elements of anticipation. Our empirical analysis focuses on three overarching projects of circulation: Somaliland’s foundational state-building-based-on-circulation project of the 1990s; shifting Ethiopian customs regimes and strategies to discipline and capture cross-border trading and livestock exports in the 2000s; and the transnational state-of-the-art corridor project of the 2010s. The article depicts Berbera corridor as a state-building frontier as well as a frontier of global logistical networks and rationalities, where new agents of circulation rearrange relations between former ones and cut across international as well as public/private boundaries.

Respatializing Federalism in the Horn’s Borderlands: From Contraband Control to Transnational Governmentality

“…Government efforts to enforce the borders tended to simply shift trade routes towards pathways of least resistance. Since the introduction of federalism, the main contraband corridor has shifted from the Djibouti-Dire Dawa route, to the Hargeisa-Hartisheik route in the later 1990s, to the Hargeisa-Tog Wajale-Jigjiga corridor after 2002 (Kefale 2019;Stepputat and Hagmann 2019).…”

Logistical geographies

“…Several recent studies have explored these ideas. Stepputat and Hagmann (2019), for example, show how since the 1990s efforts to forge a breakaway Republic of Somaliland have been inseparable from attempts to facilitate and secure circulation within and via that territory, most notably through establishing a Berbera port and corridor. In turn, Uribe's (2019:900) analysis of the troubled planning and building of a trans-Andean highway through the rainforest of the Amazon shows the inherent limits to state power in such projects, arguing that "…infrastructure is not built upon empty, homogeneous space.…”

“…Schouten et al (2019:786), for instance, argue that logistics and political order co‐produce one another, in the sense that ensuring circulation always requires intervention, and political orders are always reliant on logistics: “the meaningful projection of political power in whatever form—monopolies of force, administrative rule, governmentalities—is always also an affair of ‘action at a distance,’ a logistical problem, which needs to be recognized as essential to the constitution and contestation of political orders.” Several recent studies have explored these ideas. Stepputat and Hagmann (2019), for example, show how since the 1990s efforts to forge a breakaway Republic of Somaliland have been inseparable from attempts to facilitate and secure circulation within and via that territory, most notably through establishing a Berbera port and corridor. In turn, Uribe's (2019:900) analysis of the troubled planning and building of a trans‐Andean highway through the rainforest of the Amazon shows the inherent limits to state power in such projects, arguing that “…infrastructure is not built upon empty, homogeneous space.…”

Megaprojects—mega failures? The politics of aspiration and the transformation of rural Kenya

“…This present phase of spatial development began shortly after the year 2000, accompanied by large-scale land acquisitions and a 'new scramble for Africa' (Carmody 2011), and gained momentum when China announced its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 (Chen 2016). A growing body of literature provides interpretations of the historical legacies of the 'infrastructure scramble' (Enns and Bersaglio 2019), highlighting the return of state-led development visions (Mosley and Watson 2016), modernist logics (Dye 2019), green economy (Bergius et al 2020) and other forms of land investments (Lind et al 2020), the emergence of a state-building frontier (Stepputat and Hagmann 2019) and the underlying fascination for 'dreamscapes of modernity' (Jasanoff and Kim 2015;Müller-Mahn 2020). Yet the resurrection of megaprojects is hard to understand in so far as large-scale projects have long been criticized for notorious under-performance and cost overrides, a phenomenon described as the 'megaprojects paradox' (Flyvbjerg et al 2003).…”