Infrastructural Imperialism: Global 'Big Brothers' and Geopolitical Futures

In early European imperialism, trade and resource exploitation financed lavish building projects in metropolitan centers and fueled further colonial expansion.

Today, rising economic powers such as Turkey, China, and Brazil rely on building the infrastructure of other states to drive reconstruction in their own capitals and create “soft power” empires.

INFRAEMPIRE will turn an ethnographic lens on the infrastructural imperialism of the Turkish state, a growing power whose construction sector is reshaping the Global South and for almost two decades drove a domestic economic boom.

INFRAEMPIRE proposes, firstly, that infrastructural megaprojects create infra-imaginaries, new visions of global futures and new conceptions of the global distribution of power.

INFRAEMPIRE secondly posits that in contrast to the hierarchical relations of European colonialism, infrastructural imperialism relies upon a global “big brother” phenomenon, or infra-power, in which exploitation appears to be replaced by largesse, and relations of domination are cast as “equal” and “fraternal.” INFRAEMPIRE thirdly proposes that spectacular megaprojects create infra-subjectivities, new forms of political subjectivity that require a language beyond that of neoliberal globalization, with its teleological assumptions of increasing political and economic liberalization.

INFRAEMPIRE is methodologically innovative in developing an ethnographic approach to everyday geopolitics, or the ways that geopolitical imaginaries and tropes function in daily life, and how everyday practices construct the geopolitical.

INFRAEMPIRE is also ambitious in scope, comparing six case studies at a crucial geopolitical juncture: the seam of Eurasia, where former and aspiring empires intersect, compete, and build new worlds through infrastructure.

The aim of INFRAEMPIRE is to theorize the relationship between infrastructure and empire and to offer a fundamentally new understanding of power relations in a globalized world.