Infrastructures are an insignia of modernity. They provide the architecture for circulation of good, utilities, resources, and they also facilitate the connection of people, societies, and places across the globe. Infrastructures are generating the conditions in which everyday life unfolds. Through infrastructure imperial powers have integrated the Global South into the Global world economy. International relations, trade, and war are often animated by infrastructures, which remain crucial to contemporary geo-economic domination in the Global South. Scholars of Philosophy, Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, and Geography have examined how infrastructures are imbricated in social relationships, and by extension in politics and economics. Their findings are raising critical questions about actors and agency in a physical world, the perils and promise of infrastructure, and interlinkage of affects and materials.
To explore this concept further, the Arab Political Science Network (APSN) organized a webinar to discuss the growing interdisciplinary work linking the role of infrastructure to political and economic policies in the Global South. The event featured experts from the Infrastructure, International Politics and Everyday life in the Horn of Africa project that examines transregional relationships between the Arabian Gulf and the Horn of Africa through the lens of port infrastructures and transport corridors in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.