Infrastructures are never merely technical. They distribute life chances, foster authority, symbolize power, and facilitate integration as they shape who and what is included or rendered expendable. Infrastructures undergird imperialism, shape geopolitical conflicts and, while they foster interdependence and cooperation, they also become vehicles of dispossession, displacement, and exclusion. Infrastructures are both instruments and objects of violence; they determine how wars unfold and shape their character and duration. In short, infrastructures are constitutive for political power and co-produce the forms and modalities – direct and indirect, fast and slow, collective and individual – through which violence is enacted and sustained. 

This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars engaging with the manifold intersections of infrastructure and violence. Possible topics include but are not limited to armed conflict and its material afterlives; military and civil infrastructures; planetary urbanization; commodity chains and logistics; security technologies; borders and regimes of containment; development and its repercussions; space, earth and more-than-human environments; and the contested terrains of planning and building, repair, ruination, and abandonment.

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.