13:30 - 15:00
Room: Aston Webb – WG12
Stream: Precarious Prospects: Corridors, Grabs and Extractions at the Pastoral Margins
Chair/s:
Tobias Hagmann
Politics of circulation: the makings of the Berbera corridor in Somali East Africa
Finn Stepputat
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Copenhagen

Whereas the new critical logistics literature focuses on what Danyluk (2017) calls the ‘logistical fix’ in capital accumulation which has developed since the 1960s logistics revolution, this paper analyses the current making of the Berbera corridor with a focus on the contingencies, conjunctures and prehistories of corridor formation. We develop the concept of ‘politics of circulation’ to understand the articulation of local and regional ‘projects of circulation’ that form the ways in which transnational capital and global forms of regulation are being invested in the emerging Berbera corridor. Three ‘projects of circulation’ are of particular interest, namely 1) Somaliland’s foundational state-building-based-on-circulation project of the 1990s; 2) shifting Ethiopian customs regimes and strategies to discipline and capture circulation in the 2000s; and 3) the globalized transnational state-of-the-art corridor project of the 2010s. Apart from empirically illustrating these corridor projects and their political implications, the paper contributes to an emerging theorization of trade and transport corridors, highlighting a) the existence and interplay of multiple projects and rationalities within a corridor; b) the prominence of security as a technology to protect and stabilize flows within the corridor; and c) the role of anticipation and ‘economies of anticipation’ (Cross 2015) in corridor formation processes.


Reference:
Th-A37 Precarious Prospects 4-P-002
Presenter/s:
Finn Stepputat
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Aston Webb – WG12
Chair/s:
Tobias Hagmann
Date:
Thursday, 13 September
Time:
13:45 - 14:00
Session times:
13:30 - 15:00