Warfare and Warfarin: Chokepoints, Clotting and Vascular Geopolitics

ABSTRACT

Chokepoints are essential elements of systems centred on the regulation of flow. Geophysical chokepoints, sites of topographic narrowing, play a key role in what I call ‘vascular geopolitics’, or geopolitics based on the control of circulation rather than the control of territory. Using the case of the Roki Tunnel, which goes beneath the Caucasus mountains to connect Russia and Georgia, I show how Russia has attempted to exercise neocolonial control over the breakaway province of South Ossetia and of Georgia proper by maintaining control of the tunnel. However, chokepoints can be transformed in kind and moved in space, and this has allowed Georgians to contest this form of regional geopolitics.

KEYWORDS:

• Chokepoints
• smuggling
• Republic of Georgia
• Russia

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use a pseudonym for this man, since he has been involved in activities of questionable legality.

2 A pseudonym.

3 I have this information through personal connections with smugglers.

4 Think, for a moment, about Donald Trump's attempts to control the US-Mexico border. While much has been made of his plans to create a wall along the border, completing the wall turns out to be relatively unimportant for constituting political power by controlling immigration. What matters is that the Trump Administration has created chokepoints, both at legal ports of entry where US officials can admit or reject people seeking entry, and in the hostile Sonoran desert, where undocumented border-crossers are funnelled into a harsh and often deadly landscape. Being able to determine the location of these chokepoints is what matters, not completely sealing off the border.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation (US): [Grant Number 560537].