The authors argue that infrastructures do more than enable mobility and accelerate capital flows—they actively produce social abstractions: standardizing time, space, nature, and subjectivity; embedding capitalist logics in everyday life; and obscuring the violence inherent in these processes.

Through four case studies—port logistics, agro-industrial expansion in South America, the securitization of financial infrastructures, and Hindu nationalist urban redevelopment in India—the forum shows how infrastructures modularize spaces, transform ecosystems into calculable resources, preconfigure future exclusions, and inscribe religious identities into the built environment.

The analysis highlights how infrastructures integrate and fragment simultaneously, facilitate and restrict mobilities, and reorder geographies and political relations beyond state-centred frameworks. In doing so, they generate transnational networks and geographies of power that transcend conventional territorial categories.

By foregrounding infrastructures as both technical systems and social actors, the forum opens new avenues for empirical research into the materialities, abstractions, and frictions that shape capitalist power relations—offering a vital perspective for understanding and contesting the social and political orders they sustain.

Shrey Kapoor is a postdoctoral researcher in political science, European global studies, and South Asian studies, based at the University of Basel and the University of Zurich. He holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University.

Jutta Bakonyi is Professor of Development and Conflict at Durham University in the UK. Her main research interests are the causes, actors and dynamics of violence, orders of violence beyond the state, state dynamics and international interventions. She is also exploring the material and emotive side of violence, for example researching the nexus of displacement and urbanisation and attending to the politics of infrastructures, focussing especially on ports and transport corridors. Her regional focus is on the Horn of Africa.

Maria Eugenia is Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at Durham University. She obtained her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick and was Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre at the University of York. 

Andreas Langenohl is professor in General Comparative Social Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen. His research focuses on cultural theory, the sociology of financial markets, and the epistemology of the social sciences.