Pipeline Geopolitics: Subaquatic Materials and the Tactical Point

ABSTRACT

This paper starts from the proposition that studies of geopolitics need to address the political significance of spaces above and below the apparently twodimensional or flat surface of the land and sea. However, we depart from the view that such spaces should be defined by their verticality or conceived as three-dimensional volumes. Instead, the argument stresses the importance of attending to the relations between physical and biological things, and the ways in which the proximity of things is both mediated and supplemented by legal, and scientific and political practice. The empirical focus of the paper is a specific geopolitical puzzle. How did a short section of the route of a transnational gas pipeline, the 3500km Southern Gas Corridor, come to be a site or ‘tactical point’ at which the construction of the pipeline could be disrupted? Our contention is that any analysis of this political question must address not only the contested relations between states, corporations and civil society, but also the potential tension and interference between the horizontal networked geopolitics of pipelines and their subaquatic and subterranean construction. The subaquatic turns out not to be volume but a space of situated encounters between disparate materials.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to all our informants, including members of NoTAP, without whom this project would not have been possible. We would also like to thank Kärg Kama, Elizabeth Fisher, Georgina Born, Rachael Squire, Klaus Dodds and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The argument has benefited from discussions following lectures and seminars at the University of Frankfurt, Oxford University, the Free University of Tbilisi, UCL, and New School University, New York, at which aspects of this research project were presented..

Correction Statement

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Notes

1. Here and throughout we use the term network descriptively to refer to the pipeline network rather than as a theoretical or analytical concept.

2. We adapt the idea that disparate things may generate emergent effects broadly from Gilbert Simondon (Massumi 2009).

3. From our field notes, March 2017.

4. On the analysis of projections of corporate futures see Born (2007).

5. The events were very widely covered in the press and on social media both in Italy, and to a lesser extent, internationally. See, for example, Poti (2017), Huffington Post (2017), Squires (2017).

6. On the formation of environmental social movements in Italy, see Diani (1995).

7. The workshop on Policing Extractivism: Security, Accumulation, Pacification (5–7 October 2018) was co-organised by the Università del Salento, the Associazione Bianca Guidetti Serra, and the Transnational Institute, and supported by NoTAP and the Commune di Melendugno. It occurred in the midst of a later phase in the controversy, following the decision by the Italian coalition government to not cancel the construction of the pipeline, even though the Five Star Movement, which now formed part of the coalition government, had been opposed to the project prior to the 2018 general election. One of the central disputes in this later phase concerned the scale of the penalties that would have to be paid to the company if the project were to be cancelled. Our thanks to NoTAP for inviting one of us (Andrew Barry) to attend the workshop.

8. On the notion of situated knowledge see, in particular, Haraway, D. (1997).

9. In total, one of us (Andrew Barry) has carried out seven periods of fieldwork, each lasting between two and six weeks, on the politics of energy infrastructure in Georgia including the BTC oil pipeline. This research has involved well over 100 interviews with officials working for national governments and international financial institutions, consultants, academic scientists, company managers, journalists, activists, and members of communities affected by construction work (Barry 2013). In another paper, Andrew Barry explores the geopolitical significance of subterranean materials in the Georgian case (Barry 2016a).

10. In the UK press see, for example, Doward, T (2014), Squires (2017). Italian press coverage was extensive and highlighted the significance of the national political context see, for example, Cancellato (2017), Battaglia (2017), and Viesti (2017).

11. In this case, there was little controversy about the level of land compensation unlike, for example, in Georgia and Azerbaijan during the construction of the earlier BTC pipeline, see Barry (2013), chapter 8.

12. From our fieldnotes, Sunday 2nd April 2017, Lecce. NoDAPL refers to the controversy surrounding the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

13. On the role of abductive inference in politics see Barry (2013, 84). On the link between this local event and globalization see, for example, Albanese (2018).

14. John Agnew and Michael Shinn have observed that the promise of the 5 Star Movement is of a politics without “institutional or geographical” mediation, but this ‘promise cannot be fulfilled [in Italy]’ (Agnew and Shinn 2017, 930). Their conclusion about the impossibility of a politics without institutional or geographical mediation was arguably born out by the decision of the Five Star Movement, once it entered government, not to cancel TAP (see note 7).

15. Despite pressure from the US government, gas pipelines had previously been constructed between Sicily and both Tunisia/Algeria and Libya.

16. Here we allude to the idea of capitalization suggested by Timothy Mitchell: “the idea of capitalization points to a particular way of rendering the future available in the present. It refers to a way of building durable structures of accumulation where a certain amount of the income that can be expected in the future is sold to investors in the present” (Abourahme and Jabary-Salamanca 2016, 740; Barry 2016b).

17. On public information disclosure in the EU see Lee (2005, 190–191) and Fisher, Lange, and Scotford (2013, 200).

18. Elizabeth Fisher observes that “both [the Wild Birds and Habitats Directive]…give very little room to balance other factors with nature conservation and thus problems of divergent views are largely characterized as implementation problems” (Fisher 2006, 223).

19. Because of the Joule-Thomson effect, linking pressure and temperature changes.

20. The term ‘counter-expertise’ is used by Ulrich Beck (1992).

21. Interview with Alessandro Manuelli, San Foca, April 2017 and Manuelli, A. 2017. Analisi Progetto TAP, presentation, Università del Salento, Lecce.

22. The term public secret is used by Michael Taussig (1999) to refer to those ‘secrets’ that are not officially public, but everyone knows, which may or may not be true.

23. According to one participant in the consultation process organised by the regional government (Puglia 2013).