Infrastructural politics in the Middle East and North Africa: Pasts, presents, futures

Abstract

Infrastructures, as the humanistic and social scientific literature comprising an ‘infrastructural turn’ show, are systems that move water, raw materials, goods, electricity, trash, and people while shaping social identities and notions of citizenship, creating forms of exclusion and belonging, and producing environmental meanings and practices (Anand, 2017; Carse, 2014; Coleman, 2017; Fredericks, 2018; Von Schnitzler, 2016). Infrastructures represent an implicit contract between the state and its citizens, but one that is too frequent-ly broken in the contemporary context of vast disinvestment in public goods. As Anand et al. (2018: 5) note, today the withdrawal of public funds from the construction and maintenance of infrastructures due to neoliberal austerity regimes in the global North coexists with the “uneven flurry of infrastructural investment in the global South” in partnership with private firms and foreign investment.