The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and Securitisation in a Postcolony Frontier Space

Abstract

Infrastructure has played an agential role in the securitisation of everyday life in the Karakoram high mountains of north Pakistan. Geopolitics bear heavily on this region where Pakistan shares borders with China, with whom it has aligned its foreign and security policy, and with India, with whom Pakistan remains embroiled in a long‐standing territorial dispute. Consequently, in the Karakoram, geopolitical anxieties have reflected inwards onto local populations through both security infrastructure and securitised infrastructure. In this postcolony frontier space, statecraft also frequently bypasses normative legal and administrative structures; such exceptions to normative law and administration have antecedents in colonial statecraft on the territorial margins of empire. This paper also argues that long cycles of military rule have allowed the military to acquire and project technocratic expertise, become custodians of state‐led development, and recently, to assume guardianship of, and to enter into joint financing with China on, construction projects.

Dams, Development, and Racialised Internal Peripheries: Hydraulic Imaginaries as Hegemonic Strategy in Pakistan

“…This means developing a political practice and mode of theorising that can help overcome the divide between core and periphery across scales and dispersed networks (Kipfer 2012). Other contributions to this symposium also devote their attention to this task (Ahmad 2022; Akhtar 2022; Karrar 2022).…”

“…Pakistani historical geography is marked by distinct ethno‐regions and regional autonomy movements, a highly uneven economic geography, a long and intimate history with river development, and a history of technocratic and authoritarian military rule. As such, the country’s history provides a privileged site of theorisation of the political geographies of peripheries—a theme that connects several of the articles in this special issue (Ahmad 2022; Akhtar 2022; Karrar 2022).…”

Sparks from the friction of terrain: Transport animals, borderlands, and the territorial imagination in China

“…Much existing scholarship shows how the association between infrastructure and state power is particularly pronounced in peripheral spaces, since infrastructural expansion often accompanies military endeavours or projects of securitization (Karrar, 2022; Khalili, 2017). In recent decades, the spectacular nature of infrastructure has been harnessed by states as they seek to incorporate once remote borderlands (Rippa et al., 2020).…”

The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony

“…Akhtar (2022a) develops the concept of the “moving periphery” by analysing how the state controls or channels the mobility of people with origins in the traditional peripheries of the country, even when they are in Punjab. In a similar vein, Karrar (2022) examines the securitisation of mobility in the northern borderland region of Gilgit‐Baltistan, especially in the context of its undemocratic constitutional status in the federation of Pakistan. Ahmad (2022) dismantles the concept of a homogenous Punjab as a core region by examining the ecological and cultural dimensions of the ethno‐nationalist Siraiki movement in South Punjab.…”