Geopolitics, Infrastructure and Scale-Making in the Southern Gas Corridor

ABSTRACTLike all infrastructure, geopolitical infrastructures tell important stories about particular intentions in physical form. Cross-border fossil gas pipelines that are built to promote interests that go beyond state borders and territories are considered geopolitical infrastructures par excellence. Taking to its ethnographic focus the Southern Gas Corridor, a fossil gas transit regime and logistical mega infrastructure recently completed between the Caspian Basin and the European Union, this article examines the twin processes of the infrastructuralisation of geopolitics and the geopoliticisation of infrastructure in this region. It advocates for a meso-level recalibration of theory-building and ethnographic scope to the roles of the elites, experts, professionals, transnational activists, local stakeholders and the political materiality of the infrastructure in cross-border governance, sovereignty and statecraft by transnational infrastructural means. It argues that, in the Southern Gas Corridor, the construction of the ‘geopolitical’ as a scale was achieved not in a top-down fashion but by deliberate efforts of its human and non-human agents and actors.KEYWORDS: Energy supply securityEuropegeopolitical infrastructuresinfrastructural geopoliticsthe Southern Gas Corridor AcknowledgementsI benefitted from discussions with colleagues during the ‘Ethnographies of Megaprojects: Social and Political Worlds of Large-Scale Infrastructures’ Symposium organised under the auspices of Stockholm University, the ‘Geopolitical Infrastructures’ panel at the 2021 American Association for Geographers, and the ‘Logistical Transformations: Supply Chains and the Politics of Circulation’ panel at the 17th European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference. I thank Galen Murton, Mary Mostafanezhad, Hege Høyer Leivestad, Joanna Markkula, Vinzenz Baumer Escobar, Susann Baez Ullberg and Gabriella Körling for their organising. I would like to especially thank Gustavo Lins Riberio for (inadvertently) pushing me towards thinking about geopolitics. Galen Murton, Thomas M. Wilson, the three co-editors of this special issue and the two anonymous reviewers for Ethnos read earlier drafts and gave me robust feedback.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 When I interviewed him a decade later about his role in the makings of this megaproject, he was as euphoric as before.A note on the methods: This article draws from my visual and textual analyses of open-source SGC-related conferences and seminars, official policy documents, political statements, and news media, and to a limited extent, from my interviews with the Corridor’s elites and experts in Europe.2 Melendugno is a small township about 600 km away from Rome located in the town of San Foca of the province of Lecce in Italy’s south-east Puglia region.3 In placing these differently situated actors, I refrain from using long-exhausted binarisms like ‘from above/below,’ ‘global/local,’ ‘macro-micro’. I do this deliberately since my interest is in a meso-level analysis that would bring as many vantage points in conversation as possible.4 While the debates on the recent invasion of the Ukraine by the Russian Federation and the latter’s ‘weaponisation of energy’ arguably foregrounds the classical definition of geopolitics, I would argue that, by leaving no space to the geopolitical actors’ worldviews, everyday practices, and future projections about themselves, about each other, and what they wish to achieve through this infrastructural geopolitics forecloses a much more productive discussion wherein anthropologists could also contribute.5 In the world of project development and management, ‘large-scale, complex ventures that typically cost $1 billion or more, take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders, are transformational, and impact millions of people’ are considered as megaprojects (Flyvbjerg Citation2017: 2). The total cost of the SGC includes the construction cost of all three pipelines (except the Bulgarian spur), compressors, pigging stations, processing plants and the development of the SD II gas field. See Morningstar et al. (Citation2020).6 Political geographers and critical geopolitics scholars also consider infrastructure geopolitical when these are built to promote specific interests and concerns that transcend state borders and territories (Murton & Lord Citation2020; Murton Citation2021). Defined as such, even Roman aqueducts could be considered as geopolitical infrastructure, as one of the reviewers of this article has suggested, if one could make a case for that. This, however, is beyond the scope of this article.7 My 2019 estimation from condensate, natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas figures reported in the CIA factbook. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/383.html. This number does not include the total length of petroleum or refined product pipelines. Together the total length of world’s pipeline network is estimated to run for over 3500000 km.8 The Republic of Azerbaijan declared independence on 30 August 1991 shortly before the USSR’s dissolution.9 Interview with a Commission official, 25/1/2022, Brussels.10 See http://www.gazpromexport.ru/en/statistics/.11 I chose 2019 as benchmark, for pre-pandemic Russian gas exports to Europe were still at its all-time high. Western sanctions on Russian gas exports in response to its recent war in the Ukraine changed this situation. See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache/10590.pdf.12 Interview with a Commission official, 25/1/2022, Brussels.13 See http://www.eu2009.cz/en/news-and-documents/press-releases/declaration—prague-summit–southern-corridor–may-8–2009-21533/index.html.14 Here, I focus on how NoTAP campaigners discursively co-construct TAP/SGC as a geopolitical infrastructure, adding to infrastructure’s geopoliticisation. For more on NoTAP activism, see www.notap.it. Despite their demand that the Italian government stop the construction and divest from the project, TAP was built, as we now know.15 Funded by public money through EIB and EBRD loans and grants, these are ‘key cross border infrastructure projects that link the energy systems of EU countries. They are intended to help the EU achieve its energy policy and climate objectives: affordable, secure and sustainable energy for all citizens, and the long-term decarbonisation of the economy in accordance with the Paris Agreement’ (https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/infrastructure/projects-common-interest).16 All translations from Italian are mine.17 During the 2016 regional elections, M5S candidates won mayorships of the Sardinian town Carbonia, Rome and Turin. During the March 2018 general elections, M5S won the majority (32.7%) of votes (ca. 11 mil) and 227 of 630 parliamentary seats. Southern Italian regions’ support to M5S was remarkable; so was the Movement’s majority voter profile made up of high schoolers and young adults (18–34 years old), public employees, and white-collar workers (Scammell Citation2016).18 I identified around 37 such pipeline projects designed to carry gas to Europe from its surrounding regions during the post-Soviet era (1991–2022), 13 of which were built.19 Examining the disputes over financial transactions between countries around the world over terrorism financing, De Goede and Westermeier (Citation2022: 4) found that infrastructures enable certain types of geopolitical practices while foreclosing others per their design, technical features, commercial setups and material footing and that they ‘are not simply a tool for hegemonic power but can also be stumbling blocks and sites where hegemonic power is shaped, blocked, and routed in specific ways’. The authors call this feature of the relationship between infrastructure and geopolitics, ‘infrastructural geopolitics’.20 My use of the volumetric is in the literal sense of the term, thus different than Elden’s (Citation2013), for the physical pipeline does not expand or contract with the increase of the volume of gas it is poised to carry.Additional informationFundingSome of my research that went into this article received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation [Post-Ph.D. Research Grant #10202].