Shifting States

New Perspectives on Security, Infrastructure, and Political Affect

Alison Dundon, Richard Vokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Shifting States draws on a rich history of anthropological theorising on all kinds of states – from the pre- to the post- industrial – and explores topics as diverse as bureaucracy, infrastructure, surveillance, securitization, and public health.

As we enter the third decade of the twentieth century, there is a growing sense that 'the state' is in crisis everywhere. Although the nature of this perceived crisis varies from place to place, everywhere it is seen to have been caused by some combination of the inter-related forces of 'globalisation', of successive economic shocks, and of the rise of social media-fuelled populist movements. Yet, conversely, there is also a creeping perception that state power is becoming more pervasive in its reach, and in its effects, in ways which make it ever more imminent to the material worlds in which we live, more fundamental to the ways in which we conceive of the future, and more foundational to our very sense of self. How might we try to make sense of, and to mediate, these apparently contradictory impressions?

Based on ethnographic case studies from all over the world, this timely volume forges new ways of thinking about how state power manifests, and is imagined, and about the effects it has on ordinary people's lives. In so doing, the volume provides tools not only for understanding states' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also for judging what effects these responses are likely to have.

Part I

Ethnographies of infrastructure

Assemblage, experimentation, and mobilization

1Contingent statecraft

Infrastructures, political creativity, and experimentation

Penny Harvey

In the preface to African Political Systems (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard, 1940), Radcliffe-Brown famously wrote that, ‘the state does not exist in the phenomenal world; it is a fiction of the philosophers’ (xxiii). His comments drew attention to the fact that it is through a focus on social relations, differentiated roles, and questions of power and authority that anthropology makes its contribution to the comparative study of political institutions. Nevertheless, ‘the state’ has proved to be a powerful fiction that has held sway in disciplines well beyond philosophy. Over half a century later Timothy Mitchell returned to the problematic confusion between the conceptual and empirical life of the state in an influential article directed primarily at political scientists (Mitchell, 1991). In this work, Mitchell argues against replacing the state with the analysis of political systems. Rather, he suggests that the elusiveness of the state, and particularly the constant blurring of the boundary between state and society is intrinsic to the power relations that structure the modern world. It is the creation of the ‘uncertain yet powerful’ effect of an external state structure that warrants attention (Mitchell, 1991:78). This call to study the details and dynamics of political process as the engine of political structure resonated with both historians and ethnographers who were also opening up all kinds of possibilities for thinking about how the state is constituted as an empirical phenomenon in everyday life. In this chapter, I explore the contours of the state effect in contemporary Peru at a time when calls for increased local autonomy coincide with government commitments to decentralisation and the outsourcing of state functions. In these circumstances, I argue that the active blurring of state and society produces a quite particular state effect, which goes beyond the conjuring of an autonomous external force, to produce rather more accessible spaces of structural ambiguity that encourage political creativity and experimentation. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, I look at how such state effects are manifest in the delivery of infrastructure projects as exemplary forms of contingent statecraft.

I began thinking seriously about state effects when asked to write something about state formation from an ethnographic perspective back in 2004.¹ Confronted by what local people in a small town in the southern Peruvian Andes insisted on as a condition of state absence, I wondered how to identify state presence as a site of ethnographic attention. In this small roadside town with a modicum of services and a strong sense that they could and should receive more care, the idea that the state existed as an external, powerful force was firmly held – despite Radcliffe-Brown’s reservations. Even in a place where it was notable only by its absence, the state apparently had sufficient substance to reproduce the certainty of its existence. This was the point at which I began writing about roads.

Road construction

In the Peruvian Andes, as in so many places in the world, public infrastructures in general, and roads in particular, are widely taken as material evidence of state care or lack of it. Roads that are poorly maintained routinely prompt accusations of abandonment. I began to think with the notion of the materiality of state effects and the ways in which roads, whether abandoned, planned, or under construction, offered sites of ethnographic interest that would in some way or another provide a multi-dimensional perspective on state imaginaries (Harvey, 2005). I was not alone, of course. This focus on the material aspects of political process was also the focus of scholars of bureaucracy and state administration – and indeed ‘media infrastructures’ (who were looking at everything from paper work, documents, queues, and the relational dynamics between citizens and state officials).² A subsequent call to think about the aesthetics of state power led me to think further about the connection between the desire for roads and a local fascination with ‘concrete’³. In Peru, the symbolic value of concrete was forged in opposition to adobe. Concrete indexed modernity beyond the specificity of any particular state form, but concrete also registered the capacities of a ‘modern’ state (just as it did in Europe post-WWII). It indexed a state invested in development and, by extension, the promise of those modes of social inclusion that the basic infrastructures of roads, school buildings, health posts, police stations, and town hall buildings seemed to offer.⁴

Nevertheless, the promise, and even the eventual appearance of the Interoceanic Highway built (between 2005 and 2009) to link Brazilian producers to Peru’s Pacific ports and facilitate trade with China, did not materialise state presence in any straightforward way (Harvey & Knox, 2015). State power appeared and disappeared in a construction process that was, in many ways, devoid of tangible state presence. There was state funding (via loans from the Interamerican Bank). The national police force was deployed at key moments to ensure that traffic was effectively blocked when the construction company needed to work on particular stretches. On one occasion, riot police were called to quell a protest that threatened to disrupt the construction process. State law also surfaced in relation to the expropriation of land, both in the guise of friendly, young (predominantly female) lawyers who came to help people register their claims to compensation, and in the more abstract understanding of Law, the ever present possibility that in the end the State could expropriate the land should it so desire. And then there were the multiple moments of inauguration. Three different Presidents inaugurated sections of the road in their capacity as Heads of State, endorsing the road as a state project, albeit one appropriated for their own personal political legacies.

However, the day-to-day life of the construction process did not provide the grounds for a direct encounter with state power. The project was contracted to a consortium led by Odebrecht, the largest transnational engineering company operating in South America at the time. With its head offices located on the east coast of Brazil, Odebrecht designed the road and had responsibility for its construction. The Peruvian state was their client. The social obligations and responsibilities with respect to issues such as social impact, environmental protection, and the employment of local people, were embedded in the contract. The contract was not available for public scrutiny, and the whole construction process was surrounded in rumours and uncertainties. The outsourcing of the social dimensions of this ‘public’ work was itself distributed among local governments and individual citizens finding themselves responsible for realising the potential of the infrastructural provision, but with little or no possibility of influencing the decisions of the construction company who answered only to their client, the central state administration. At the same time, the state was also the client of the lending institutions who were looking for transformations in administrative processes that would produce stable conditions for the successful financialisation of infrastructural investments or loans. Local municipalities along the existing road lobbied frantically to ensure optimal routing for local businesses and to maximise the number of jobs offered to local people. However, on the whole, they found themselves obliged to negotiate with the construction company, not with ministers of state. The technical staff responsible for key decisions on routing were also contracted by the construction company, and it was the company who mobilised the raft of technical, legal, and administrative instruments that both articulated their practice to the normative functions of state power and, at the same time, constituted a sphere of expertise and authority that supplemented or stood as proxy for state decision-making. It was on one such issue that local people found themselves confronted by riot police when they marched to the construction camp to demand that the company attend to their needs. They were residents of a town that had effectively been by-passed by a decision to route the road around the edges of the settlement rather than through the middle. Although it was hard to justify the destruction that their preferred routing would have entailed, people were nevertheless desperate for some tangible material transformation of their everyday environment. They had campaigned long and hard for this road, but when it arrived it seemed set to destroy their livelihoods (that depended on vehicles and passengers stopping in their central square for provisions and accommodation). Worse still, they found that they would have to continue to live with the dust that a new asphalt surface should have done away with. They asked the company to tarmac the street in front of the school, but the company refused arguing that the budget did not allow them to step in to solve the specific problems of each and every settlement along the 700 km route. They were not contracted to act as a proxy state and the welfare of citizens was not their general and overarching concern. The contract required them simply to deliver the road, abstracted from the complex field of desires and expectations that underpinned its popularity.

This incident raised the question of who exactly this road was for.⁵ Local needs and desires were subordinated to a more generalised and distributed national population, and the interests and agreements made with the international lending institutions. In this case the Peruvian state was conjured as an agent of change in a scenario in which the authority of state actors was entangled in the opaque and inaccessible decisions and motivations of the engineering companies and the banks. For us as ethnographers, the focus on these modes of apparent state erasure allowed us to pose questions about state presence from a new angle. Rather than discussing state presence or absence in relation to whether the state had, or had not, provided a road, we could ask instead what understandings and experiences of the state were brought into being in and through the construction process.

Throughout the twentieth century, dreams of infrastructural integration had been harboured by Peruvian Presidents faced with the challenge of effectively configuring an integrated national territory.⁶ However, the connectivity, both material and informational, intrinsic to a modern road network, is not contained by a national border without considerable effort. Twenty-first century roads, even relatively unsophisticated ones, do not merely support transportation but also stake out the ground for the flow of other utilities such as electricity and mobile telephony and all the communicational potential that these imply. Indeed, one of the key rationales invoked to justify the cost of laying this 700 km strip of asphalt concrete in an otherwise marginal and remote region of the country was the possibility of ensuring connectivity to the powerful Brazilian economy, tantalisingly close and yet inaccessible. Thus, the road both consolidated and breached the fiction of the state as sovereign national territory.

The road was also undoing the fiction of the state in other ways. The capital loans that enabled the construction were supposedly oriented to the development of international trade, international flows, and markets. But there were fears that this project had revealed weakness and dependency. Some argued that Peru was simply fulfilling the ambitions of a more powerful neighbour. Brazil had a fast tarmac road waiting at the border, and the suspicion that Brazil had more to gain from the investment than Peru was a constant topic of speculation. The new road gave Brazilian traders access to lucrative eastern markets via the ports of Peru’s Pacific coast. People questioned whether the Interoceanic Highway was an infrastructure that would strengthen Peru as a player in international markets, or whether it was simply an opportunity for Brazilian enterprises to reap healthy profits at Peru’s expense. The loans that underpinned the project were nowhere near sufficient to build the kind of road that would transform the possibilities for international trade. The engineers had to build up and around high mountains and across active fault lines, and there was no option of deploying the kind of modern tunnelling technology found in Norway or Switzerland. When Odebrecht’s most senior management were found guilty of corruption in 2015, nobody in Peru was really surprised. Odebrecht was Latin America’s largest construction conglomerate. In 2015, caught up in the Brazilian investigation into corruption in the state oil giant, Petrobras, Odebrecht’s chief executive, Marcelo Odebrecht, and 76 other company executives were jailed for corruption offences, including illegal donations to presidential elections and cabinet ministers. Interestingly, many of the state agents named by Odebrecht executives claim that they are lying, telling the stories that prosecutors want to hear in order to get more lenient prison sentences, and to clear the way for new contracts to be made.

The case remains obscure but has led to the resignation and indictment of the Presidents of both Peru and Brazil and the dramatic suicide of twice President Alan Garcia. What is not in doubt is the fundamental entanglement of state and corporate agencies with the diversion of funds for illicit purposes at the heart of their collaboration. The Odebrecht example raises the question of how to work ethnographically with the notion of ‘state effect’ in neoliberal ti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Conference note
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction Richard Vokes and Alison Dundon
• Part I Ethnographies of infrastructure: Assemblage, experimentation, and mobilization
• Part II Dialectics of security, surveillance, and struggle
• Part III Sensory states, and their contingent citizenries
• Index