Convener: Jason Mosley
Speakers: Biruk Terrefe (Oxford) and Harry Verhoeven (Columbia)
This article offers a longitudinal study of the complex entanglements between infrastructure and sovereignty in the Horn of Africa. By analysing Ethiopia’s imperial transport corridors, the political economy of Djibouti’s Red Sea ports, and the Greater Nile Oil Pipeline between South Sudan, Khartoum, and global markets, we underline the co-production of infrastructure and sovereignty as a defining feature of regional politics in the last 150 years. In a region notorious for the redrawing of borders, continuous violent conflict, and contested sovereignties, we emphasize the contingency of this relationship by making two central arguments. First, infrastructures have been central to the exercise of sovereignty and the consolidation of political orders in the region; dams, pipelines and ports have spearheaded efforts to hardwire centralizing political institutions, extractive commercial relations, and centripetal sentiments of belonging. Second, in doing so these infrastructures have sought to disable infrastructural alternatives because rival infrastructural visions embody competing claims of sovereignty. However, as state-building projects and the infrastructures they prioritize have often failed to successfully neutralise opposing articulations of political authority and belonging, we argue that the vulnerability of existing infrastructures contributes to the vulnerability of political order in the Horn. This article draws attention to the roads not taken and how those could have changed -and might still reconfigure-the politics of the region.
Dr Biruk Terrefe is a Departmental Lecturer in African Politics. His research broadly focuses on how infrastructure projects and the control of urban spaces are integral to the politics of state-building in the Horn of Africa. His recent work has been on the Ethiopian state and the tensions between the ruling party’s centralised developmental ambitions and the ethnically federated architecture of the state. This tension becomes particularly evident in the study of infrastructure, as highly contested material spaces of political bargaining.
Dr Harry Verhoeven is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, focusing on the political economy of climate change, international relations and the linkages between water, energy and food security. His regional focus is on Africa, the Middle East and the Western Indian Ocean. He is a Senior Advisor to the European Institute of Peace. He also founded the Oxford University China-Africa Network in 2009 and remains its Convenor. He is an Associate Member of the Department of Politics & International Relations at the University of Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Cambridge.
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