Politics of Disavowal: Megaprojects, Infrastructural Biopolitics, Disavowed Subjects

Abstract

Focusing on the construction of Lamu Port as a focal point of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in Kenya, this article explores how megainfrastructures are entangled with processes of life-making and -unmaking, thus producing specific subject dispositions within a state’s infrastructural biopolitics as infrastructure-based capacitation and control of national populations. Analyzing sociopolitical effects of state-led megaprojects, civil society mobilization, and livelihoods of artisanal fishermen, the article develops a theoretical account of a politics of disavowal—a tacit denial of a state-admitted responsibility and support to vulnerable populations that, despite formal inclusion into the state’s development visions, are rendered constitutively absent within biopolitical spatialities of life advanced by the state. Thereby, the article triangulates the binary of bio- and necropolitics standardly deployed in multiple theorizations of (re)production of liberal capitalist life in geographical and interdisciplinary literatures on biopolitics, necropolitics, or politics of infrastructure. It specifically foregrounds how governance of vulnerable, expendable populations does not oscillate between intentional life- and death-making, flourishing and effacement, bio and necro but unfolds as a politics of disavowal—a confluence of formal recognition and material neglect by the state, expressed as a dialectic of presence and absence, inclusion and neglect.

本文聚焦肯尼亚拉穆港—南苏丹—埃塞俄比亚运输（LAPSSET）走廊的拉穆港建设, 探讨了大型基础设施如何与创造和毁灭生命的过程交织在一起, 在国家基础设施生物政治中产生了独特的主体安置, 并以此作为基于基础设施的能力培养和国家人口控制的方式。本文分析了国家大型项目、民间社会动员和个体渔民生活的社会政治影响, 从理论上解释了“否认政治学”：尽管国家将弱势群体正式纳入发展规划, 却无声地否认了国家承诺的对弱势群体的责任和支持, 在国家推动的生命生物政治空间中形成结构性缺失。因此, 本文对生物政治学和死亡政治学的二元关系进行调节。在关于生物政治学、死亡政治学、基础设施政治学的地理学和跨学科文献中, 这种二元关系常见于自由资本主义生命（再）生产的多重理论中。它明确指出, 弱势可牺牲人口的治理, 不是摇摆于有意识的生与死、繁荣与消亡、生物与死亡之间, 而是国家正式承认与事实忽视相结合的否认政治学, 辩证地表现为存在与消失、包含与忽视。

Centrándose en la construcción del Puerto de Lamu como punto focal del Corredor de Transporte Puerto Lamu–Sudán del Sur–Etiopía (LAPSSET), en Kenia, este artículo explora el modo como las megainfraestructuras se entrelazan con los procesos de creación y obliteración de la vida, produciendo así disposiciones específicas de los sujetos dentro de una biopolítica infraestructural del Estado, como capacitación basada en la infraestructura y el control de las poblaciones nacionales. Analizando los efectos sociopolíticos de megaproyectos de responsabilidad estatal, la movilización de la sociedad civil y los medios de vida de los pescadores artesanales, el artículo desarrolla una explicación teórica de una política de desautorización –una tácita negación de la responsabilidad y el apoyo a las poblaciones vulnerables admitidos por el Estado que, pese a la inclusión formal en las visiones desarrollistas del Estado, se perciben constitutivamente ausentes dentro de las espacialidades biopolíticas de la vida alentadas por el Estado. Entonces, el artículo triangula el binario de la bio- y la necro-política, que es habitualmente desplegado en las múltiples teorizaciones de la (re)producción de la vida capitalista liberal en las literaturas geográficas e interdisciplinarias sobre biopolítica, necropolítica o políticas de la infraestructura. Específicamente, relieva que la gobernanza de poblaciones vulnerables y prescindibles no oscila entre la intencionalidad de generar vida y muerte, el florecimiento y la supresión, bio y necro, sino que se desenvuelve como una política negacionista –una confluencia de reconocimiento formal y desestimación material por el Estado, expresada como una dialéctica de presencia y ausencia, inclusión y abandono.

Key Words:

• infrastructural biopolitics
• Kenya
• LAPSSET
• megainfrastructures
• necropolitics
• politics of disavowal

关键词：:

• 基础设施生物政治学
• 肯尼亚
• LAPSSET
• 大型基础设施
• 死亡政治学
• 否认政治学。

Palabras clave::

• biopolítica infraestructural
• Kenia
• LAPSSET
• megainfraestructuras
• necropolítica
• política de repudio

On 2 March 2012, Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki, at the inauguration ceremony of the Lamu Port–South Suda–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in Lamu, stated, “I have no doubt that this day will go down in history as one of the defining moments when we made a major stride to connect our people to the many socio-economic opportunities that lie ahead” (BBC News Africa 2012, italics added). In the event attended by presidents of South Sudan and Ethiopia and local and international media, Kibaki’s words highlighted how LAPSSET symbolically and materially tethers the people of Kenya with state-led visions of a “better life” and “development”¹—the many socioeconomic opportunities that lie ahead. LAPSSET is a transport and infrastructure corridor for industrial and agricultural investments, often cited as the most ambitious megaproject in East Africa. It is designed to connect the region through grandiose infrastructures: a deep-water port in Lamu, a highway and railway network from Lamu to main economic hubs in Kenya and on borders with Ethiopia and South Sudan, and a pipeline to transport refined petroleum products from South Sudan crude oil fields or oil drill sites in Lokichar, Turkana, to Lamu Port and then to East Asian commodity markets (see Figure 1). The wider project also includes resort cities, new airports, and agricultural commodity processing and export hubs that are expected to generate economic growth (LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority 2016; Lesutis 2020). Expressing a logic of regional integration, LAPSSET is central to Kenya’s national development strategy, Vision 2030, aimed at transforming Kenya into an industrialized country, overcoming its aid dependencies, and achieving a “middle‐income status” in less than two decades (Enns 2017).

Figure 1 Map of the LAPSSET Corridor. LAPSSET = Lamu Port–South Suda–Ethiopia Transport. Source: http://www.lapsset.go.ke.

Connecting Kenya’s people with the socioeconomic prosperity that lies ahead, megainfrastructures, envisaged to provide “development” to national populations, function as modes of biopolitics—extension of state power over physical and political bodies of a population to safeguard their vitality, thereby entangling this population, both materially and symbolically, with a multilayered web of state power (see Foucault 1976). It is through a multiplicity of infrastructures (transportation networks, water and sewage systems, or fiber-optic networks that capacitate human life, bios, within state territories) that states seek to realize “development”: “ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order” (Foucault 1976, 138), achieving “an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces” (Foucault 1976, 25). Indeed, infrastructures are central in the (re)production of liberal capitalist life and the control of populations, materials, and governance processes, particularly in modern cities (e.g., Joyce 2003; Dillon and Reid 2009; Mitchell 2011; Easterling 2014). As Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) noted, infrastructures function as “urban fetishes”—seemingly neutral entities with the promise of “a better society and a happier life” (31). This frequently concealed mediating role of infrastructure in aligning physical networks, socioeconomic systems, and commodification processes has been explored in relation to contemporary megaprojects and their role in determining spatial configurations of liberal capitalist life across the globe (e.g., Kanai and Schindler 2019; Wiig and Silver 2019; Lesutis 2021a). Therefore, present-day grandiose infrastructures—resembling high modernism of the twentieth century (Dye 2016)—transmit, both implicitly and overtly, biopolitical logics of the administration of life to ensure vitality and enhance productive powers of human populations (Braun 2014; Wakefield 2018). This is what I call infrastructural biopolitics—infrastructure-based state interventions to control and capacitate its populations to conduct themselves in ways that perpetuate specific forms of sociopolitical power (see Foucault 1976).

Concurrently, though, across many contexts, such infrastructure-based (re)production of liberal capitalist life results in active undoing of conditions of possibility, particularly for marginalized populations. In fact, as anthropological literature demonstrates in detail, infrastructure subjects the vulnerable to suffering, harm, or even premature death, theorized as infrastructural violence that materially mediates structural and corporeal modes of injury (e.g., Appel 2012; Rodgers 2012; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012). Salamanca (2011), for instance, demonstrated how this infrastructural violence, mastered in Israel’s tactical calculations of settler colonialism in the occupied Palestinian territories, intentionally “undoes the ordinary geographies of everyday life by generating and unfolding a hostile topography of infrastructure networks” (35; also see Weizman 2007). In a similar vein, Truscello (2020) argued that necropower depends on industrial infrastructures that let live and make die—for “every new infrastructure project initiated by industrial capitalism generates a ‘brand new corpse’” (263).

Beyond infrastructure studies, the inadequacy of biopolitics to explain such circumstances of sociopolitical control where active infliction of corporeal harm and potentiality of death are sanctioned as modes of governance has resulted in several conceptual revisions. The most prominent of these was articulated by Mbembe (2003), who, addressing a Eurocentric bias within Foucault’s (1976, 1997) work on biopolitics, advanced a framework of necropolitics. Foregrounding corporeal harm and constant threat of death as central to sociopolitical power, necropolitics first foregrounded systemic, institutionalized modalities of violence inflicted on the colonized body to control and exploit it. Despite this initial emphasis on the colony, focusing on corporeal harm, extreme cruelty, and death—the “morbid spectacle” of “death-in-life,” “death-world,” “living dead,” and populations “kept alive but in a state of injury” (Mbembe 2003, 21, 35)—necropolitics has been applied beyond historic spaces of the colony to understand contemporary modalities of governance (e.g., Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017). As Mbembe (2019) himself explained in a recent revision of the framework, necropolitics highlights “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (68)—“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death” (92). Central to necropower is control of space as “the raw material of sovereignty and of the violence it bears within it” (Mbembe 2019, 79), achieved through an infrastructural means of spatial fragmentation, splintering, and division. Relying on the example of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine, Mbembe (2019) called these modalities of necropolitics “infrastructural warfare” that results in “the state of siege” (82) and “the repressed topographies of cruelty” (92). To live under such circumstances “is to experience a permanent condition of ‘being in pain’ … a certain kind of madness” (Mbembe 2019, 91). In other words, as a necropolitical means of exterminatory governance, infrastructure deliberately subjects everyday life to suffering, despair, and death.

In geographical scholarship on the (re)production of liberal capitalist life analyzed through the frames of biopolitics and necropolitics, the dynamics of life and death, living and dying, bio and necro, are not necessarily antithetical but have been theorized as intricately entangled (e.g., McIntyre and Nast 2011; Castro 2015; Williams 2015). As Lee and Pratt (2012) explained, the necropolitical “[is] in increasingly close proximity to the biopolitical” (891), with bio and necro functioning in “a dialectic unity” in the governance of contemporary life (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017, 1280). Echoing this, in this article I analyze how megainfrastructures are intertwined with life-making and -unmaking, particularly in articulating relations between the state and its populations, thereby producing specific subject dispositions within the state’s biopolitics. In contrast to interdisciplinary scholarship on biopolitical and necropolitical modalities of governance and their mutual intertwinements, though, I argue that in such contexts as LAPSSET—specifically its relation to the most vulnerable, historically marginalized populations in Lamu—the subject that emerges is neither biopolitical nor necropolitical. This subject is not constituted through its deliberate entanglement with modalities of control and capacitation that infrastructural biopolitics might generate and sustain (see Foucault 1976). Nor—even if megainfrastructures and their techno-politics indelibly encompass potentialities of injury—is this subject governed through its material subjugation to bodily harm or premature death in the manner that Mbembe (2003, 2019) analyzed in his theorization of necropolitics.

As Puar (2017) astutely observed, in contexts where neither biopolitical nor necropolitical modalities of governance prevail, the interpretations of biopolitics standardly levitating between life and death, bio and necro—or confluence of the two (e.g., McIntyre and Nast 2011; Lee and Pratt 2012; Castro 2015; Williams 2015; Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017)—ought to be triangulated to understand how the state engages with its populations beyond explicitly biopolitical and necropolitical enunciations of living and dying. Puar (2017) foregrounded deliberate debilitation of populations—“the right to maim,” or “injuring but not letting die”—that makes power visible on the body to control it. Although echoing Puar’s theoretical emphasis of triangulation, in this article I highlight different contemporary governance mechanisms where power does not materially intersect with—sustain, maim, disappear, or annihilate—the body. I demonstrate that the control of historically marginalized populations does not pendulate between intentional life-making and -unmaking, nor does it manifest in biopolitical debilitation and maimed corporeality of expendable bodies (see Puar 2017), even if potentialities of injury loom hidden within technopolitics of megaprojects. Instead, this form of governance unfolds through disavowal, a tacit denial of state-admitted responsibility and support to fragile populations that, neither capacitating them through modalities of biopolitics nor materially subjecting them to corporeal harm or death through necropolitical modalities of life-unmaking, renders the disavowed subject constitutively absent within spatial unfoldings of megainfrastructures. Through disavowal as a mode of governance, the disavowed subject is effectively made unrepresented and uncared for, materially unmarked by the state’s infrastructural power, within biopolitical spatialities of life enabled by megaprojects.

I develop this theorization of a politics of disavowal by discussing how LAPSSET, contrary to the Kenyan state’s narratives of “prosperity,” does not deliver the promised “development,” instead disavowing historically disadvantaged groups. In Lamu, where 70 percent of the local population depends on artisanal fishing, the ability to sustain oneself is intimately intertwined with access to the sea. This, however, has been severely affected by the construction of Lamu Port, which has displaced local fishermen from their traditional fishing grounds. Witnessing this infrastructural rearrangement of livelihoods, several local civil society groups, focusing on human rights, socioeconomic development, and community empowerment, united under the alliance of Save Lamu to challenge the Kenyan state. Through community-based research and mobilization, this alliance specifically articulated a biopolitical subject of care that ought to be accounted and cared for in Kenya’s infrastructural biopolitics. This vulnerable subject was particularly made visible to the state when Save Lamu inserted it into the state’s administrative apparatus and its judicial power web by taking the LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority to the High Court of Kenya. Even though the court case was successful—and this vulnerable subject was formally recognized as requiring biopolitical care in a form of financial compensation for displacement—the needs of this subject have been hollowed out by an ongoing conflict over different meanings of “development” and the central state’s resources in Lamu. Therefore, within Kenya’s infrastructural biopolitics, the subject of care articulated by civil society is ultimately constituted as a disavowed subject. Unaccounted for by the state during the implementation of megainfrastructures, as well as ultimately neglected in the civil society’s struggles for biopolitical capacitation, this subject, rendered constitutively absent, is left in the margins of the space produced through LAPSSET.

This article is based on ten weeks of fieldwork research undertaken over two different time periods between January 2019 and January 2020 in Nairobi and primarily in Lamu County: Lamu Island, Manda Bay, Lamu Port, and other LAPSSET infrastructures in the county, as well as local government county offices. This research included interviews with representatives of the LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority (LCDA), officials of Kenya Ports Authority, local government officials in Lamu, civil society groups, and key local informants. The research also involved open-ended interviews, informal conversations, and participant observations with Lamu’s fishermen at times of boat maintenance work, fishing, and social gatherings. Their reflections on their lives, Lamu Port, and “development” provide an important perspective for understanding the politics of disavowal activated through LAPSSET’s infrastructural biopolitics that I explore here.

The article is structured as follows. First, I discuss historical marginalization of Lamu’s population, outlining how, with the state’s promise of biopolitical capacitation, LAPSSET was inserted into heterogenous, unequal sociopolitical landscapes. Second, I explore how a neglect of artisanal fishing in the development of Lamu Port triggered organized forms of sociopolitical contestation that, in response to the megaproject, articulated a biopolitical subject of care requiring inclusion into Kenya’s infrastructural biopolitics. Third, I explain how this civil society mobilization resulted in a court victory against the Kenyan state, thereby securing a sizable financial compensation for Lamu’s fishermen; this, however, has activated an ongoing conflict over different meanings of “development” and the central state’s resources, which—despite the formal, judicial acknowledgment of artisanal fishermen’s rights—has effectively resulted in their disavowal. I conclude by reiterating the main argument on the constitution of disavowed subjects within Kenya’s infrastructural biopolitics, also highlighting how a politics of disavowal advances geographical and interdisciplinary scholarships on biopolitics, necropolitics, and infrastructure.

LAPSSET as the State-Promised Capacitation

The sociopolitical geographies of coastal Kenya today known as Lamu County historically have been defined by constantly shifting constellations of power. From the late seventeenth century onward, Lamu was under the influence of the Omani Protectorate. In the early nineteenth century it flourished as a prosperous port city and religious center, with its wealth derived from the Indian Ocean trade and plantation agriculture based on slave labor. This thriving economy of Lamu—that, with the changing dynamics of power in the Indian Ocean trade, in the middle of the nineteenth century came under the influence of the Zanzibar Sultan—was drastically altered by the Scramble for Africa that, following the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885, defined the history of colonization in Africa. Lamu first became a target of Germany’s imperial ambitions in East Africa, soon curtailed by the British, who established their dominance in most of the region by the end of the nineteenth century (Romero 1997). After the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, the political and economic influence of Lamu, until then primarily based on slave-run agricultural plantations, was directly undermined, making Lamu lose its significance in the Indian Ocean trade (Romero 1986). In parallel, in the nascent British colony of Kenya, with the development of the Uganda Railway that connected Mombasa Port with Lake Victoria, Kenya’s highlands became the epicenter of the British colonial project (Lesutis 2021a). As this led to decreasing importance and subsequent marginalization of Kenya’s coast, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Lamu was relegated to a minor role as a small local harbor in the colony of Kenya (Ylvisaker 1976; Siravo and Pulver 1986).

Half a century later, however, these landscapes became a site of political turmoil. Following Kenya’s independence in 1963, Lamu was destabilized by the Shifta War (1963–1967), during which ethnic Somalis in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District attempted to secede from the country to join Somalia, with internally displaced populations fleeing to Lamu County to seek shelter. Following the conflict that ended with the Kenyan state defeating the separatist movement and securing its territorial integrity, in the early 1970s, the newly independent state, to stabilize the coastal region and make it profitable, attempted to implement large-scale commercial agriculture schemes for cotton and seed marketing. Due to the central government’s inability to successfully realize these programs, however, they were soon abandoned, and the state instead focused on several land settlement schemes for populations themselves to undertake commercial agriculture. Between 1973 and 1975, the government accommodated the arrival of Kikuyu families from Kenya’s central highlands that, to this day, occupy the most fertile and best serviced lands in Lamu County (Chome 2020). Meanwhile, populations indigenous to the region, including the Bajuni, Boni, and Sanye, not granted official rights to own land, were systematically incapacitated by the Kenyan state. As one community leader in Lamu remarked,

The glorious days of Lamu we had before independence are now gone, and we [have been] left to the mercy of the thieves and crooks of the [central] government. (Lamu, December 2019)

In the last two decades in Lamu, this biopolitics of the Kenyan state that privileges and sustains ethnicity-based clientelist and patronage networks (see Lynch 2006; Jenkins 2012) has been further accentuated by escalating regional security dynamics. Following Kenya’s military intervention in Somalia in 2006 to combat of Al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based terrorist jihadist fundamentalist group active in East Africa and Yemen, Lamu County, has been a target of terrorism. This includes the attacks on Garissa Town in 2012 that left ninety-four people dead, the kidnapping of French tourists in Lamu in 2014, and the most recent attacks on the U.S. military air base in Manda in January 2020. These incidents led to strict state-dictated security measures in Lamu County, specifically military curfews, which resulted in limited domestic and international travel to the county. This has further entrenched poverty, because with limited investments and drastically reduced numbers of tourists, Lamu County, dependent on tourism, has witnessed a sharp decline in income-generating opportunities. As one small-scale trader, resident in Lamu, noted the day after the attack on the U.S. military base,

the [Kenyan] government has its own agenda, and it does not [consider] us at all. All these security measures here, the American [soldiers] patrolling Lamu, made us hungry here—and what for? It’s of no use to us. It only [has] made our [lives] difficult. (Lamu, January 2020).

In the context of the historical marginalization and recent securitization of the region, from the state’s perspective, both Lamu Port and LAPSSET signify socioeconomic development. As Rojo Macharia, Lamu County Commissioner, observed, with increasing activities of Al-Shabaab in the region,

Lamu has been very insecure, and violence has been an issue here. With LAPSSET we changed that: We basically opened up the county, so now it is more secure and stable. (Lamu, December 2019)

Contrary to these narratives, though, some in Lamu perceive the question of security as the central government’s strategy to legitimize the infrastructure-based state interventions in the region. Although not explicitly articulated in formal interviews, it was often in casual conversations with my acquaintances in Lamu that the relationship between the governance of Lamu and a politicized use of terrorism was highlighted. As one fisherman explained,

For [the] government, Al-Shabaab is the best weapon to use in town. It’s enough to say that somebody is Al-Shabaab and then [they are] done. … The security situation was the [central] government’s way to sabotage Lamu—there is no insecurity here. It was just a way for the government to get access to land in Lamu without actually paying people here. It was a very clever way to control this situation. (Lamu, December 2019)

Indeed, as several human rights organizations reported, in Lamu, police had accused, and even unlawfully detained, activists campaigning against disruptive effects of LAPSSET for allegedly having links with Al-Shabaab (see Human Rights Watch and National Coalition of Human Rights Defenders Kenya 2018).

Although in local vernaculars the central government-led development interventions are interpreted in the context of the recent political turmoil, rather than being a twenty-first-century phenomenon, Kenya’s modernization strategy that is centered on megaprojects prevailed immediately after national independence. The inner circle of the first postindependence prime minister, and then later president, Jomo Kenyatta included modernizing elites who favored extractive forms of capital accumulation based on export promotion and urban development (Fourie 2014). In this context, in 1972, Lamu’s coastline was identified as the most suitable site on Kenya’s coast for a second national port to be constructed (Enns and Bersaglio 2020). This plan was not fully explored until 2005, however, when, with changing regional power dynamics—namely, South Sudan’s independence—Lamu gained strategic importance in regional circuits of extractivism and commodity transportation. Due to ongoing political tensions with Sudan, South Sudan became interested in having an oil pipeline to Lamu to ship its crude oil to East Asian commodity markets. Following several regional partnership agreements between Kenya, South Sudan, and Ethiopia, in March 2012, the construction of a new port and oil refinery began in Lamu, with the first phase requiring a US$23 billion investment (Bremner 2013).

As an integral part of Kenya’s Vision 2030, LAPSSET is supposed to bring “development” to Lamu County and Kenya more broadly, thereby capacitating local and national populations to achieve the long-desired prosperity. The planned modern port of thirty-two berths is a focal point of the corridor that encompasses different layers of transport infrastructures such as networks of highways, a standard gauge railway, an oil pipeline, and an airport. Other plans include developing a Special Economic Zone, an oil refinery, and a new state-of-the-art metropolitan city, conceptualized with explicit references to global symbols of contemporary capitalism, such as Silicon Valley or Dubai, thereby projecting a “high-modernist ideology” that is to come to the region (Mosley and Watson 2016, 456–57). With this “modern” aesthetic, LAPSSET and associated initiatives—as numerous infrastructure projects across the globe (e.g., Ghertner 2015)—constitute powerful imaginaries of prosperity, development, and opportunity. For the Kenyan state, megainfrastructures are “the driver to socio-economic growth and development that defines the path to transformation and evolution of human society; It increases efficiency in the delivery and management of public services; It allows societies to expand their opportunities, to exploit their full potential; and to realize a peaceful living environment” (LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority 2016, 28). Kenya’s national authorities project this corridor development to attract more than 1 million newcomers to Lamu County that, with the planned urban developments, is expected to sustain economic growth (LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority 2016). As one civil servant explained,

You cannot see it yet, but the master plan [of the Special Economic Zone] is full of spectacular investments that the Kenyan government wants to bring—casinos, hotels, laboratories, even an opera house; it is going to be like the Middle East. (Nairobi, November 2019)

Because the development of LAPSSET is supposed to create material conditions for a “better life” to flourish, the project—besides its structural function in regional and global regimes of extractivism (see Lesutis 2020)—also has a biopolitical function of life-making. Providing conditions for specific socioeconomic modalities of biopolitics to unfold, it seeks “to ensure, sustain, and multiply, to put this life in order” (Foucault 1976, 138). It namely aims to integrate Kenya’s population and territory into regional and global flows of capital, inserting them “into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum” (Foucault 1976, 24). Therefore, through LAPSSET, like other national megaprojects (see Lesutis 2021b), the state articulates an ideal subject of the future Kenya—a mobile, entrepreneurial subject that will directly benefit from, and be capacitated by, infrastructure development and transforming socioeconomic landscapes. For instance, in the official presentation on expected outcomes of LAPSSET prepared by the LCDA, the president Uhuru Kenyatta was quoted as saying that the corridor, as part of Kenya’s Vision 2030, “will create jobs which will enable our people to meet their basic needs. Jobs will transform the lives of our people from that of hardship and want, to new lives of greater comfort and wellbeing. And that is the future I have seen” (LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority 2019, 7, italics added). Through these iterations, the national population—our people—is enunciated as a target of the infrastructure-based state intervention: Our people become “an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labour capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded” (Foucault 1976, 25).

Just as in other parts of Kenya where LAPSSET and other megaprojects have triggered economies (Elliot 2016; Kochore 2016) and subjective dispositions (Lesutis 2021b) of anticipation, these imaginaries of a desired future are further sustained in Lamu County where local residents themselves expect positive changes (also see Chome 2020). As many others in Lamu Town, one local businessman, for instance, remarked,

In the future, all of the business will be there in the port. All the future is going to be there. Here [in Lamu] we will only have a sleepy town for tourists to visit. (Lamu, December 2019)

This local belief in the positive transformations instigated by LAPSSET demonstrates how sociopolitical power operates beyond the state apparatus, expressing itself at multiple levels of social life, simultaneously constituting specific dispositions of subjectivity that sustain this power (see Foucault 1976). To date, however, the expected benefits of LAPSSET only operate symbolically: The actual material effects of the megaproject in capacitating local lives to flourish in ways that would realize the state-promised prosperity are yet to be seen and experienced. Nevertheless, despite this deferred promise of “development,” LAPSSET is already interacting with social life in Lamu in profound ways, particularly interrupting how vulnerable population groups sustain themselves on an everyday basis. In other parts of Kenya, LAPSSET and other megaprojects have been shown to increasingly limit access to land and other natural resources for historically marginalized populations, thereby triggering contestations over meanings of “development” (Kochore 2016; Enns 2017; Lesutis 2021a, 2021b). In Lamu, with the port construction already underway, LAPSSET has similarly escalated competition over land and ignited a conflict over sociopolitical meanings of identity, belonging, and “development” (see Chome 2020). Lamu Port has also had a noticeable impact on local livelihoods that depend on access to the sea. It is on these artisanal fishermen’s livelihoods, intimately intertwined with the Indian Ocean, that I focus in the following two sections.

Save Lamu and the Biopolitical Subject of Care

With the anticipated changes in natural resource governance and the projected influx of 1 million newcomers to Lamu County, the construction of Lamu Port has resulted in a mobilization by civil society, challenging the way infrastructure development has unfolded in the region. In 2010, several locally and nationally active civil society groups that work on human rights, local development, and community empowerment formed the alliance of Save Lamu. Considering the region’s historical marginalization, Save Lamu focuses on a meaningful inclusion of Lamu’s populations into the LAPSSET development, specifically demanding a comprehensive environmental and social impact assessment of the project. It deemed the Kenyan state’s efforts to represent “real development” aspirations of Lamu’s people to be fundamentally limited and thus ineffective to ensure their participation in infrastructure developments that, drastically changing their relationship with the natural environment, are expected to directly affect their lives. As one activist observed,

[LAPSSET] was coming to destroy us by taking our land and the sea. We had no land title deeds here—those rights were never given to us. So we had to do something. (December 2019, Lamu)

Central to this civil society mobilization was the development of the Bio-Cultural Community Protocol (BCCP) that recorded, documented, and consolidated socioeconomic data about the populations local to forty-six villages across the Lamu Archipelago; these include artisanal fishermen, small-scale farmers, traditional healers, hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and harvesters, primarily from indigenous groups of the Bajun, Aweeer, Sanye, Orma, and Swahili. Coordinated by Save Lamu and undertaken by several community-based organizations—through participatory action research, focus group discussions, community mapping, and legal training—this exercise synthesized and presented the dynamics of social life in the archipelago. Through this, to strengthen local responses to state-led megaprojects, the BCCP formulated a community “development” vision: It emphasized distinctive customary laws, values, and decision-making processes, particularly those concerning the stewardship of “indigenous” territories of “indigenous” Lamu’s populations that, according to the report, make up over half of the county’s total population (around 56,000 people; Save Lamu 2010).

Even if the BCCP is not legally binding, its aim is to ensure that external actors, particularly the national government, respect values, livelihoods, and lifeworlds of the populations considered local to Lamu. The main strategy to achieve this objective has focused on vulnerability of these populations. As Butler (2020) observed, in the context of exclusionary biopolitics where states disregard the lives of marginal populations, “If a group is called ‘vulnerable’, then it gains a status that enables it to make a claim for protection” (71). Foregrounding heightened precarity of everyday life in the Lamu Archipelago, the BCCP has presented a fragile subject, “autochthonous” to Lamu County, as “vulnerable” and thus requiring support in the context of megaprojects. As the protocol, for instance, specifies, “These communities have participated in managing [natural] resources over the centuries, conserving them until the present day. Yet, today their livelihoods, which depend upon the fragile environment, are threatened by numerous development projects in the region including the Kenya Government’s LAPSSET project … as part of the state’s Vision 2030” (Save Lamu 2010, 9). Therefore, rather than opposing the state and its “development” visions, this fragile subject is articulated as one that requires biopolitical care; in practice, this would result in a meaningful inclusion into the state’s infrastructural visions, thereby ensuring that LAPSSET benefits Lamu’s communities, directly addressing their concerns, interests, and “development” preferences.

To this fragile subject requiring protection in the face of megainfrastructure development (as the name Save Lamu itself indicates), the natural environment, particularly the sea, is a central part of its social ontology: “To us, the Indian Ocean is not perceived as a border, but rather an extension of our land in the water and an additional resource to the terrestrial natural resources of our area” (Save Lamu 2010, 14). Livelihood patterns of this subject are depicted as synchronized with movements of the Indian Ocean: “Our fishing methods and areas are harmonised with the cycles of the monsoon winds and the phases of the moon. Thus when the monsoon winds blow, we use the inner channels and creeks and when the monsoon is over, we fish in the open sea” (Save Lamu 2010, 18). As such, the connection with the natural landscape is understood as central to the community’s well-being: “our environment is our wealth—when our environment is healthy, we are healthy. When our environment suffers, we suffer” (Save Lamu 2010, 26). This discursive formulation of a fragile subject, fundamentally intertwined with the natural environment that is existentially threatened by infrastructure development, functions as “giving a detailed accounting of [oneself]” (see Foucault 1976, 37) and making Lamu’s populations legible to the state: It provides comprehensive information about material textures of everyday life and livelihoods that could enable the state to understand these forms of sociality and include them in its mega-project-based biopolitical modalities of capacitation. As the Save Lamu (2010) specified, “This document has been produced to provide a roadmap for grasping the social contours of our lives and the traditional mechanisms that have guided our sustainable use of natural resources” (11).

This formulation of the biopolitical subject of care—as the civil society’s attempt to challenge and change the unprivileged position of Lamu’s population in the complex power web of the Kenyan state—directly represents material dynamics of life across the Lamu Archipelago. Because more than 70 percent of Lamu’s residents depend on the sea for their livelihoods, artisanal fishing is a mainstay in the region, especially for people living on the archipelago’s islands (Salim 1978). Despite its centrality, though, historically the fishing industry has been located at the intersection of multiple uncertainties. Fishing activities are entirely undertaken in in-shore sea areas sheltered from strong winds during the rainy season (April–July). Even though there are plenty of fish that can be harvested from offshore fishing grounds, local fishermen lack appropriate fishing gear to explore these deep-sea areas, which results in extreme overfishing of in-shore areas. Another major challenge is a lack of adequate fish storage facilities; as a result, the marketing of fish in main market chains in Lamu and the wider coastal region is dominated by middle men who, owning storage infrastructures, take advantage of their position and set cheap fish prices, thus directly influencing low financial income for Lamu’s fishermen (Lamu County 2013).

In this context of the preexisting livelihood insecurities, Lamu’s fishermen are particularly vulnerable to social and environment changes triggered by LAPSEET, whose developments are already reconstituting the relationship between the sea and local livelihoods that are dependent on it. Manda Bay at the southern edge of the archipelago is the site of the new port. With the construction commencing in 2012, out of the planned thirty-two berths, at the time of research (December 2019–January 2020), three berths that had claimed a total of five square kilometers of Manda Bay were nearing completion; the first berth started operating on 20 May 2021. The port construction works, including land reclaiming from the sea, or digging and dredging works, destroyed coral reefs and mangroves that are main fish breeding grounds, thus making the area unsuitable for fishing. In other parts of the bay, since the initiation of the port construction, according to local fisherfolk, fish catch has decreased due to the ongoing dredging work that, bringing up dirt and sand, pollutes fish breeding grounds. As a result, artisanal fishing has become especially challenging during the rainy season between April and July, for Manda Channel, sheltered from strong winds and waves of the Indian Ocean, used to be the principal fishing area during this season. Due to the extremely limited local capacity to purchase deep-sea fishing equipment, Lamu’s fishermen are witnessing a shrinking operational space for their livelihoods. Related, the existing transport corridor between the islands within the Lamu Archipelago is likely to be affected by the planned maritime industry: The fishermen’s movement in the sea is expected to be increasingly limited by marine traffic once Lamu Port starts operating. Even fishermen who previously did not work in Manda Bay are concerned about the port construction; they anticipate that an eventual complete displacement of fishermen from the bay will lead to increasing competition in the remaining, and already severely overexploited, in-shore fishing waters. Therefore, even at the initial stages of development, Lamu Port is profoundly rearranging conditions of life in Lamu County. Rather than transforming artisanal fishers into “modern” subjects (whether they like it or not) as promised by the Kenyan state through the LAPSSET development, the existing modes of social reproduction are further marginalized by Lamu Port.

These already felt impacts figured as a trope for Save Lamu to challenge the Kenyan state to materially represent the subject of care that should be included into the national “development” vision and the state’s infrastructural biopolitics. Given new political opportunities opened by the national constitution reform implemented in 2010—including the establishment of independent judiciary, as well as increasing public focus on accountability, public participation, and livelihood protection—in 2014, Save Lamu submitted a court case against the LCDA for not taking into consideration how LAPSSET was going to affect local people’s livelihoods (also see Chome 2020). Highlighting that the state had failed to meaningfully follow the existing national legal regulations on megaproject implementation, the legal case fundamentally questioned the very terms of political belonging—namely, the inclusion of certain historically marginalized populations into Kenya’s infrastructural biopolitics. As one activist observed,

The problem with these projects like LAPSSET is that they are not done according to the law, and that they do not include local communities. People are left out, as if they were outside the law, as if they were not supposed to be properly presented by the national law of Kenya. (Lamu, January 2020)

Such observations about illegality, or even necropolitical potentialities of impunity, are evidenced by the documented abuse against environmental activists in Lamu and across coastal Kenya (see Human Rights Watch and National Coalition of Human Rights Defenders Kenya 2018). According to local activists in Lamu, following civil society mobilization against detrimental effects of LAPSSET, police targeted peaceful protests in Lamu, in some instances arresting activists, detaining and releasing them without any charges several hours or days later. In 2014, police raided the Save Lamu offices, confiscating equipment and interrogating key staff. In 2016, two outspoken local land rights activists, Mohamed Avukame and Ali Bunu, disappeared after, according to several eyewitnesses, being kidnapped by men wearing Kenya’s national police uniforms. Despite such harassment and intimidation by state authorities, which highlight how, to silence dissent, in specific instances the Kenyan state might resort to a necropolitical means of control, Save Lamu has continued to rely on legal mechanisms of representation provided by the state. Employing the BCCP and officially engaging with the judicial apparatus that constitutes a part of the state’s power to administer life (see Foucault 1976), Save Lamu has aimed to include the vulnerable subject into the state’s biopolitical modalities of capacitation to be created and sustained by megaprojects. Next, I discuss how this process has extended biopolitical logics of life-making to the subject of care articulated by Save Lamu.

Governing through Disavowal: Disavowed Subjects

On 1 May 2018, in an unprecedented high court ruling, Save Lamu won its legal battle against the Kenyan government. The court case that the alliance submitted with the technical help of Katiba Institute² was successful on all grounds. The three-judge bench in the High Court of Malindi ruled that the construction of Lamu Port resulted in clear violations of the rights to public participation, public information, a clean and healthy environment, and culture. In addition, it did not involve the local county government in the LAPSSET planning and implementation. Regarding the artisanal fishermen’s livelihoods, the High Court ordered the Kenyan government to report on external costs of the project, recognize fishing rights as amounting to property, and pay US$170 million in compensation to 4,700 fishermen displaced by the port construction. Although this ruling was celebrated by Kenya’s civil society as an unprecedented case in the national history of human rights, it was immediately appealed by the central government on all but three points that directly concern the financial compensation to Lamu’s fishermen. At the time of research in January 2020,³ however, the compensation was yet to be paid. Although the fishermen’s rights to indemnification were not contested by the Kenyan government, their livelihoods—particularly how they ought to adapt to the new social and environmental context advanced by LAPSSET—have become a focal point of an ongoing disagreement over different visions of “development” that reflect fundamentally conflicting interests of the central and local government authorities, civil society, and representatives of Lamu’s fishermen. This contestation, I show in what follows, has disavowed the very subject of care articulated by Save Lamu as an attempt to include vulnerable populations into the Kenyan state’s infrastructural biopolitics unfolding through LAPSSET.

A primary point of contention has been the exact number of fishermen who should be indemnified. Following the court ruling, the list of affected fishermen initially prepared by Lamu’s county government was expanded from 4,700 fishermen and now includes nearly 7,000 individuals. This has resulted in a conflict over the meaning of “artisanal fishing.” On the one hand, the LCDA claims that this extended list has been corrupted by local political interests; according to its representatives, following the court ruling favorable to Save Lamu, in Lamu and beyond, individuals with connections to the local government have infiltrated the list to appropriate the central state’s financial resources ordered by the High Court to be allocated to the compensation budget (Nairobi, November 2019). On the other hand, Lamu County’s government authorities point out that, due to the lack of sufficient information provided at the initial stages of the port construction—which the LCDA and the Kenyan Government were specifically taken to court for—not all local fishermen knew that they were officially required to register their livelihoods to be represented in the state’s development vision. Furthermore, even if some fishermen might have known this, at the time of the registration, they had no financial means to purchase fishing licenses (Lamu, December 2019).

Whereas state officials focus on the legally required regulatory procedures that make populations countable and knowable in the state-led administration of life, the representatives of Lamu’s fisherfolk challenge this strictly bounded temporality of indemnification followed by the central government. According to them, the time lapse between 2012 (when the LCDA was taken to court) and 2018 (when the court ruling was announced) should be acknowledged in the compensation process. In these six years, the number of fishermen affected by Lamu Port has increased. It is not only young men, unable to find alternative employment, who partake in this livelihood activity; some men are also abandoning the local tourism industry, which has witnessed a sharp recession due to the recurring security concerns in the region. The question of compensation also extends into the future. Highlighting the preexisting overreliance on the sea, and only having a few alternative livelihood strategies, the fishermen’s representatives question how many more fisherfolk will be displaced by national “development.” Although implicitly making political critiques about the state, they simultaneously emphasize that these dynamics of “development” are local issues that should be addressed within Lamu County; according to them, the exact number of fishermen who will share the financial compensation should not concern the central government, which, in their understanding of the ongoing dispute, is deliberately exploiting the complexity of the local fishing industry as an excuse not to distribute the promised funds (Lamu, December 2019).

Besides the contested question of who counts as a fisherman to be capacitated by the central state’s resources, the objective of this compensation itself has been equally disputed. This disagreement reveals fundamentally contrasting visions of “development” held by the central government and sociopolitical elites on the one hand and the fishermen’s representatives on the other. From the LCDA’s perspective, rather than being distributed individually, the compensation money ought to be used to empower local fishermen; this would require a state institution–supervised acquisition of adequate boats and fishing gear so that Lamu’s fishermen could capitalize on deep-sea fishing, as well as organizing practical training on offshore fishing to enable them to cope with challenges of deep-sea fishing. To achieve this, the LCDA proposed implementation of development schemes that would provide necessary equipment to clusters of ten fishermen. This would effectively address the long-existing problem of overfishing, enabling fishermen to successfully exploit deep-sea resources (Nairobi, November 2019). In these proposals, the historically precarious context of artisanal fishing embodied by the biopolitical subject of care articulated by Save Lamu is effectively used by the central government to justify its potential future “development” interventions.

Fishermen’s representatives, though—the Lamu Beach Management Unit, including boat owners, fishing crew, dealers, dhow makers, line and net fishers, processors, and dhow operators—reject these modernization proposals for several reasons. Given Lamu’s historical marginalization, the county has no adequate infrastructure to repair or maintain new equipment promoted by the central government. Instead, Lamu’s fishermen prefer to use boats that can be built and maintained locally. Moreover, given the contested sociopolitical landscapes characterized by ethnicity-based patronage networks (Lynch 2006; Jenkins 2012)—which are reinforced through megaprojects across the country (Elliot 2016; Chome 2020; Lesutis 2021b)—the fishermen also deeply mistrust the central government to provide any meaningful assistance. They point out how the compensation budget will likely be appropriated by politically connected suppliers that will provide services and equipment above standard market prices, thus financially benefiting from the compensation process. Finally, anxious about the nascent large-scale marine industry that is expected to make artisanal fishing more challenging, or even no longer possible, fishermen’s representatives also highlight an impending necessity to diversify their livelihoods and, for instance, purchase real estate to practice other types of livelihoods. Therefore, in this context, the position articulated on behalf of Lamu’s fishermen highlights that they prefer to invest the compensation money without direct interference from the government.

The county government in Lamu, which is supposed to mediate this disagreement over the compensation and the future of artisanal fishing, claims to have a middle position “trying to balance development with politics” (Lamu, January 2020). According to its representatives, although the fishermen need some financial compensation to observe the initial livelihood disruptions caused by the construction of Lamu Port, it is important to use the allocated budget strategically, strengthen the industry itself, and capacitate local livelihoods. This would include a sustainable industrialization of artisanal fishing that has long been neglected by the central government in Nairobi. A similar position is shared by Save Lamu that instead of supporting direct distribution of funds, has advocated for the creation of fishing cooperatives and industrial fishing training programs, which it sees as necessary in building local capacity to adapt to the new national development context centered on large-scale industrialization (Lamu, December 2019).

As local livelihoods are being translated into rationalities of industrialization, cooperation, and adaptation, some critics highlight how the infrastructure-based disruption of artisanal fishing—which disproportionately affects the poorest segments of Lamu’s population—is being exploited by local elites, including Save Lamu, for different political aims. According to such critiques, the prioritization of “integrated development” focuses on specific types of capacitation and sustainability that do not actually represent local interests, instead promoting the preexisting development programs of the central and county government authorities that coincide with such larger political projects as Blue Economy (Lamu, January 2020). Spearheaded by President Uhuru Kenyatta, who in 2017 created a Presidential Blue Economy Task Force, the objectives of Blue Economy prioritize the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, livelihoods and jobs, and ocean ecosystem health. Interventions in sectors such as fishing—alongside aquaculture, maritime transport, tourism, or environment conservation—are a central focus of Blue Economy. It has become one of Kenya’s key priorities: In 2018, Nairobi hosted the first global Sustainable Blue Economy conference, which resulted in the Nairobi Statement of Intent on Advancing a Sustainable Blue Economy (see Sustainable Blue Economy Conference 2018). In this context, the central and local government authorities see the financial compensation allocated to Lamu’s fishermen as an opportunity to achieve larger national “development” objectives that do not necessarily represent actual interests of the fishermen. As one civil servant observed,

LAPSSET or Blue Economy, [they are] of no use to [Lamu’s] fishermen—they have their immediate needs that need to be met. They cannot wait for the money that the High Court has allocated to them to fulfill other political agendas of the government or civil society. (Lamu, January 2020)

As the biopolitical subject of care articulated by Save Lamu is entangled with the infrastructures of LAPSSET and the ongoing competition over the central state’s financial resources and meanings of “development” that they trigger, the artisanal fishermen of Lamu are disavowed in this process. They are displaced from the opportunities of self-subsistence by the Kenyan state, which is increasingly focusing on megainfrastructures as the main strategy of “development.” Subsequently, their ability to successfully adapt to the changing sea ontology mediated through the new port is delayed, or even foreclosed altogether, by the competition among different elite groups to access the central state’s resources. These dynamics, therefore, undo the successful (although only in a formal, judicial sense) civil society mobilization to articulate the subject of care that requires inclusion into Kenya’s infrastructural biopolitics. As one civil servant observed,

When these different [interest] groups are fighting, it is the genuine fishermen who they are supposed to represent that are impacted the most. They are the ones who have difficulties to go fishing now, they cannot make the very little money that they normally make. They need their compensation—whether it is money, or equipment. (Lamu, December 2019)

In this context, Lamu’s fishermen eke out a living in the increasingly shrinking operational space of their livelihoods. One of these fishermen, for instance, explained,

The port [is taking] the sea from us. It spills dirty water in the sea. Now we have to go further into the sea, and it is dangerous for us. I don’t know why [nobody] is helping us. (Lamu, January 2020)

As the fisherfolk have abandoned the fishing areas destroyed by Lamu Port, the new port is not a direct threat in itself. Instead, harm might result from dangers of deep-sea fishing into which Lamu’s fishermen are being pushed. Therefore, although megainfrastructures are inevitably associated with necropolitical violence (e.g., Truscello 2020), with Lamu Port, this manifestation of necropower mediated through infrastructure, rather than being vividly pronounced as presenting direct threats of corporeal harm to the local fishermen, is more ambivalent.

In this context, the biopolitical subject of care articulated by Save Lamu is ultimately constituted as a disavowed subject. Despite the successful mobilization by civil society and the judicial recognition of the vulnerable subject’s rights, the state does not aim to capacitate or render this subject productive. Nor, formally recognizing its existence, does the state inscribe power on this subject’s body by deliberately exposing it to corporeal harm or “invisible killing” (Mbembe 2019, 83) that might result through infrastructure development (e.g., Salamanca 2011; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012). Instead, the politics of disavowal in Lamu is imbued with uncertainty and constitutive absence: As Lamu Port is expanding, the disavowed subject is increasingly pushed into the margins and an uncertain future. Commenting on the expanding port developments, one fisherman, for instance, noted that

I have to find a living somewhere else. But I don’t know any other trade, so I don’t know what I will do, and where I will go. (Lamu, December 2019)

In these circumstances, through disavowal as a governance strategy, the disavowed subject—neither capacitated nor controlled to be made productive through modalities of biopolitics, nor materially subjected to bodily harm or death-making through necropolitical means of infrastructure (although such harm, or the potentially thereof, always looms within assemblages of megainfrastructures)—is effectively rendered sociopolitically absent, unaccounted for, left to endure in the margins of Kenya’s infrastructural biopolitics, constituted and sustained by such megaprojects as LAPSSET. In other contexts of infrastructure development, Appel (2012) demonstrated that infrastructural violence is redoubled by “the work of disentanglement” that actively abdicates responsibility for direct and indirect harm making of infrastructure development. In Lamu, however, even when the state formally acknowledges its responsibility to care for and include vulnerable groups into its visions and practices of “development,” this admission is ultimately materially meaningless. The body of the disavowed subject is pushed into the margins where—at least for now—it remains unmarked by the violence of power; the power that, to sustain itself, aims to render physical and political bodies controllable, knowable, and productive (Foucault 1976) or, within necropolitical renditions of governance, seeks to annihilate, laying expendable bodies of the marginal and vulnerable to waste (Mbembe 2019).

Conclusion

This article analyzed how megainfrastructures are entangled with processes of life-making and -unmaking, particularly in articulating relations between the state and its populations, thereby producing specific subject dispositions within the state’s biopolitics advanced through megaprojects. Focusing on the construction of Lamu Port as a focal point of the LAPSSET Corridor in Kenya, it discussed how infrastructural biopolitics as a mode of governance articulates conditions of a “better life” that, materially not yet present, are a deferred possibility of the future. At the same time, however, this biopolitics that concerns the promised capacitation of national populations undermines the already limited possibilities of self-subsistence for Lamu’s artisanal fishermen whose livelihoods are severely disrupted by the new port. In this context, mobilization by local civil society has discursively articulated a fragile subject of Lamu needing biopolitical care of the state. Nonetheless, even if these civil society’s efforts to insert this vulnerable subject into the state’s administrative apparatus were successful in a formal, judicial sense, due to the ongoing conflict over different meanings of “development” and the central state’s resources that were unleashed by the favorable court ruling to compensate Lamu’s fishermen, this subject of care is again displaced from biopolitical modalities of capacitation. In this article, I theorized these dynamics as a politics of disavowal—a tacit denial of state-admitted responsibility and support to vulnerable populations, which, despite formal recognition by the state, renders them effectively absent in the spaces of biopolitics advanced through megainfrastructures. Through disavowal as a governance strategy, the disavowed subject is enunciated as constitutively absent, materially unaccounted for, and abandoned to endure in the margins of megaprojects.

A politics of disavowal—as a confluence of formal recognition and material neglect by the state—foregrounds how the governance of the vulnerable, expendable, and dispossessed does not oscillate between life and death-making, flourishing and effacement, bio and necro, frequently deployed in theorization of bio- and necropolitics (see Foucault 1976; Mbembe 2003, 2019), as well as within geographical scholarship on the (re)production of liberal capitalist life (see McIntyre and Nast 2011; Lee and Pratt 2012; Castro 2015; Williams 2015; Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017). Through this theoretical development, the article demonstrates that the subject that emerges in the spaces coproduced by megainfrastructures is not constituted through its entanglement with modalities of capacitation and control advanced through infrastructural biopolitics (see Foucault 1976). Nor—even if technopolitics of infrastructures engender potentialities of injury—is this subject materially confronted with corporeal harm and death worlds in the manner that Mbembe (2019) analyzed through necropolitics as a form of death-making, thus demonstrating how contemporary social life is increasingly administered through the material destruction of human bodies. Instead, I highlight the ways in which the governance of vulnerable populations does not pendulate between intentional life-making and -unmaking but unfolds through disavowal. Although the state mobilizes on the supposed capacitation of life to justify the remaking of space, as well as formally promises inclusion into its developmental visions, it does not fulfill this biopolitical promise to historically marginalized populations. Through disavowal as a governance strategy, the state effectively renders these groups constitutively absent and materially unaccounted for within biopolitical spatialities of megainfrastructures. Even if disavowed, though, the lives of these populations are not materially subjected to corporeal injury or death as the main mode of their governance. Instead—and in contrast to Puar’s (2017) theoretical exposition of how power reproduces itself through maiming as a biopolitical triangulation of life- and death-making—in Lamu, materially unmarked by the violence of power, the disavowed subject is left to endure in the margins of megaprojects.

Second, highlighting how megainfrastructures, besides ordering capital’s spaces and territorialities (Kanai and Schindler 2019; Wiig and Silver 2019; Lesutis 2021a), also shape the lives of vulnerable populations, the article demonstrates how grandiose infrastructures govern life in intimate ways and with what sociopolitical effects megaprojects structure—or, in fact, negate—conditions of possibility in landscapes where these infrastructures materialize. In geographical scholarship, there has been an overarching emphasis on peopled infrastructure developed through a focus on socialities of infrastructure systems, demonstrating how the marginalized connect with one another and with material systems to function at the margins of urban life (e.g., Silver 2014; Graham and McFarlane 2015; Fredericks 2018; Lemanski 2020). This echoes anthropological scholarship on malleable futures and open promises of infrastructure that unevenly shape people’s capacities to make more efficient choices regarding the resources available to them in heterogeneous contexts of precarity (e.g., Larkin 2008; Harvey and Knox 2012; Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018). In contrast, highlighting how for historically marginalized people, for whom structural inequalities and exclusion are ongoing, with the contemporary return to high modernism (Dye 2016), infrastructural biopolitics result in their disavowal, the article emphasizes the importance of understanding infrastructures as people-disavowing. This politics of disavowal is not specifically enabled by infrastructural violence that materially sustains structural (e.g., Appel 2012; Rodgers 2012; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012) or corporeal, necropolitical modes of injury that subjugate the body to state power (e.g., Salamanca 2011; Truscello 2020). Instead, this politics unfolds through the simultaneous presence and absence of biopolitical capacitation: a formal, discursive acknowledgment of vulnerable people’s rights to be meaningfully included into the state’s practices of “development” that does not materialize. As I show in other contexts across Kenya, this capacitation—mediated by class, ethnicity, or geography—is only realizable for some, relatively privileged, groups (see Lesutis 2021b).

Finally, a politics of disavowal is not only specific to infrastructural biopolitics, nor to the postcolony. Disavowal foregrounds how within power webs of social life under late capitalism orchestrated by a modern state—whether displacements caused by unrealizable promises of “urban renewal,” minority groups ultimately disadvantaged by meaningless liberal politics of “inclusion,” or empty talk of “mindfulness” and “resilience” to precarious workers in creative industries—social textures and topographies of everyday life are shaped through a dialectic of presence and absence, inclusion and neglect. This dialectic unfolds as a formal acknowledgment of a right to a dignified life, ultimately only a discursive event hollowed out by interests of more powerful sociopolitical groupings. Highlighting this, as a conceptual armature, a politics of disavowal fosters critical attentiveness to the present and to the world, in which a white noise of capital’s power and its relentless profit-driven laws of motion forcefully supported by a state—particularly its renditions that obscure hardship and despair, not striking nor salient but manifesting in mundane forms of eking out a living in spaces where the disavowed are not materially represented nor meaningfully accounted for—is deafening but, nevertheless, sometimes is (and always must be) pierced by theory and praxis.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Jolynna Sinanan, Chris Sandbrook, Kenny Cupers, Monica Nkina Sairo, anonymous reviewers, and Kendra Strauss for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the article. I am also grateful to government officers, civil servants, activists, and fishermen in Lamu for engaging in my research.

Additional information

Funding

UK Research and Innovation's Global Challenges Research Fund (Grant Number: ES/P011500/1). Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship (Project ID: 101023118).

Notes on contributors

Gediminas Lesutis

GEDIMINAS LESUTIS is a Marie Curie Fellow in Geography at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include critical theory, infrastructure studies, precarity, extractivism, queer and feminist theories, and politics of contemporary capitalist development across South and East Africa.

Notes

1 In this article, I refer to both a “better life” and “development” in quotation marks to underline their discursive function (see Ferguson 1990) within governance processes.

2 A national nongovernmental organization that aims to promote legal knowledge and understanding of Kenya’s constitution, as well as to defend and facilitate its implementation.

3 This remains the case at the time of writing (November 2021).