The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler‐State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade

Abstract

Scholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect “critical infrastructure” from disruption. However, Indigenous‐led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty. The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state’s escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti‐capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti‐colonial struggle.

Making and Mastering Violent Environments: Following the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Coastal Louisiana

“…But the limits to these negotiations are now clear: in its latest attempts at mastery the state has relied on the discursive sleights of hand of the Master Plan to merely conceal the ecological damage of oil infrastructure development, while making inadequate moves to materially address it, all but ensuring that the existential threats posed by climate change will intensify along the coast. Addressing these threats demands a break with the logic of accumulation that has long dominated infrastructural politics and a move toward “alternative forms of infrastructural life” (Bosworth and Chua 2021:3).…”

What is ‘affective infrastructure’?

“…LaDuke and Cowen, 2020; Spice, 2018). While certain forms of insecurity, paranoia, and fear are crucial supports for right-wing populisms, and the security state and policing they desire (Bosworth and Chua, 2021; Woodward, 2014), it is not the case that ‘negative’ affects cannot be part of social endurance. Choi demonstrates that in contrast to extant concepts of ‘social resilience’, infrastructures of feeling allow for a more capacious understanding of how critical affects such as anger or indignation can still form elements of endurance (see also Henderson, 2008).…”

“…Anishinaabeg political activist Winona LaDuke and geographer Deborah Cowen draw a division between the colonial form of infrastructure and a provisional, ‘slow, transformative feminist work of social re/production’ (2020: 264). Though it could appear as a quick comparative move content with focusing on how Indigenous thought has ‘resonances’ with a European thesis of relationality (as warned against by Dorries and Ruddick, 2018: 620), I want to point out that The Red Nation (2019) precisely involutes the socialist tradition of Marxism as supposedly emanating from the West, reminding us instead that the revolutionary project is fully realized in anti-colonial infrastructures of caretaking relations (see also Dunbar-Ortiz, 2016). The second ‘side’ of ‘affective infrastructures’ thus seeks to articulate, and make us conscious of, the need to stave off economic, technical, and ideological alienation by building the forms of organization that through group transference of affects, grow and sustain the organizational infrastructure to produce collective subjects who can analyze and diagnose the social situation.…”

Pipelines in the “Public Interest”? The Jurisdictional Work of a Concept in Canadian Pipeline Assessment

“…Still, the shifts epitomised in the “modernisation” project the state’s sovereign anxieties (Bosworth and Chua 2021) and the tacit recognition that disruptions to flows can greatly hinder imperial statecraft ambitions at home and abroad. For this reason, the state has routinely criminalised Indigenous land and water defenders, alongside other opponents of extractivism, as threats to the “national interest” (Monaghan and Walby 2017).…”

“…In practice, public interest amounts to what Borrows (1999:558) calls “key words that unlock sovereignty’s power”. Its foundational status in pipeline regulation and assessment reveals the state’s central role in securing the circulatory infrastructures of capital, facilitating the reproduction of settler life and sustaining colonial warfare (Bosworth and Chua 2021; Cowen 2020; Spice 2018).…”