Papers by Evelina Gambino
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024
The infrastructures of global logistics are hailed as developmental solutions for countries previ... more The infrastructures of global logistics are hailed as developmental solutions for countries previously peripheral to global trade routes. Building on ethnographic fieldwork performed in the village of Anaklia, West Georgia, this article proposes a grounded analysis of this developmental promise. It does so by focusing on the attempted construction and failure of a deep-sea port that was set to turn the village into a logistics hub part of the Belt and Road Initiative. In dialogue with ethnographic accounts of infrastructural failure and feminist approaches to the study of global circulation, this article outlines the villager's efforts to "domesticate" the promise of prosperity attached to the port. Mapping how the intimate spaces of the village have been transformed by the mercurial promise attached to Anaklia Port. In the aftermath of the project's failure, this article shows the marks that projected logistical future have left on the village's economy and life. In doing so this paper sheds light on the variegated impacts that logistical projects leave behind, even when they remain unfinished.
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Economy and Society, 2024
This paper develops an analysis of the politics and temporality of infrastructure through a focus... more This paper develops an analysis of the politics and temporality of infrastructure through a focus on the idea of a project. A project (noun) is an assemblage of expertise, labour, materials and resources. The development of a project to build a port, pipeline, a mine, or a hydropower plant entails the mobilization of ideas, finance, political support and the law, the containment of material forces, as well as the organization of expertise, resources and labour. To project is also a verb; to throw forwards or to imagine, visualize or speculate on a possible future, which may or may not be actualized in practice. Moreover, individual infrastructural projects are often built on the legacy of earlier projects and conceived as contributions to ambitious projections of the future-including modernization, socialism, development and state building. Our analysis of the politics and temporality of projects is both developed and illustrated through an account of infrastructural projects in the Republic of Georgia which are also understood as contributions to a larger project of transition.
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Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2023
Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pip... more Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, fibre optics cables, data, and logistics centres. Built above and below ground, they connect, channel, and, at times, halt the movement of humans, commodities, and resources that populate the earth. Infrastructures can also be immaterial: software, flows of data, and capital and the systems that organise them. A most basic definition can be gleaned from the term itself: the prefix ‘infra-’ means ‘below’, which highlights infrastructure’s role as the ‘underlying structure’ that allows a system to function. Infrastructures are not traditional ethnographic sites, yet in recent years a growing number of anthropologists and other social scientists have started to analyse them. Ethnographies of infrastructure have shown how these overlooked objects and networks offer exciting insights into the processes that make up social life. These studies have often highlighted the paradoxical quality of infrastructures, showing how they underwrite mundane daily interactions at the same time as being sites where dreams of alternative worlds are played out. Infrastructures remind us of the past and shape ideas of the future. They are both concrete things, and also structures that enable other things to move and be brought into relation with one another. For all of these reasons infrastructures are needed, coveted, and fought for. They channel new forms of power and act as catalysts for political struggle. This entry traces a growing body of work on infrastructures and their social implications. It shows how following infrastructures has allowed ethnographers to extend their analyses across multiple scales, shedding new light on practices of statecraft, ideas of the environment, political possibilities, and conceptions of time and space. Attention to infrastructures helps us analyse past and present societies and push for a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that the future might take.
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Connections, 2023
For the past decade, the village of Anaklia has been set to become a transit node for goods and p... more For the past decade, the village of Anaklia has been set to become a transit node for goods and people, aimed at positioning Georgia as a key juncture amongst global logistics networks. This short intervention builds on insights from the ethnographic fieldwork performed in and around Anaklia between 2017 and 2019. It shows that fragments of an abject past are visible in the friction between global and local practices of future-making that came to populate Anaklia. These fragments, despite being ostensibly ignored by the contemporary promise of seamless connectivity waged by the future hub, underwrite its construction and sustain its developers' claims to expertise. As the pursuit of logistical connectivity becomes the organizing principle for ever larger parts of the global economy, this ethnographic inquiry can work against the grain of Georgia's recent 'logistical revolution' towards a global reading of the forms of alterity produced by contemporary regimes of accumulation.
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Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2019
Georgia, the post-Soviet republic in the South Caucasus, is undergoing its own logistics revoluti... more Georgia, the post-Soviet republic in the South Caucasus, is undergoing its own logistics revolution. The government has pledged to complete by 2020 a spatial plan which aims to turn the country into a transit corridor for the New Silk Road. Whilst this development is still underway, logistics zones-infrastructural hubs, free industrial zones, manufacturing areas and malls-are emerging across the Georgian space. The New Silk Road initiative is promoting a perspective of a world without barriers, where logistics is not a means but an end: a world in which connectivity is productive in itself and where geopolitical reasoning has succumbed to geoeconomic calculations. This article aims at problematising this view by providing a grounded analysis of the workings of logistical spaces in Georgia, exploring the discourses, frictions and histories which engender capital accumulation within and beyond the Georgian space.
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This collection of essays seeks to intervene in the lively discussions about logistical capitalis... more This collection of essays seeks to intervene in the lively discussions about logistical capitalism within and beyond academia, by unearthing the multiple ways in which gender underwrites global circulation. The essays gathered here build on a wide array of feminist and post-colonial works from a range of disciplines, adding to the already existing wealth of analyses that discuss the complex imbrications of processes of gendering and racialization within projects of accumulation on a global scale and across different temporalities. Crucially, we contend that addressing these issues through an explicitly logistical gaze does not amount merely to a reformulation of the insights of these important bodies of work, but rather it is the result of the political urgency to name and counteract the specific mechanisms through which contemporary capitalism shapes our lives and extracts from them. This e-book thus provides a range of interventions which, however diverse, all place gender at the ...
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Political Geography, 2021
This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregroun... more This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregrounding and pluralising its material and temporal dimensions. At the same time, it speaks to a renewed centrality and relevance of infrastructure and infrastructural projects in political discourse. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically. Specifically, these contributions intervene in existing geographical debates by bringing to the fore four underexplored dimensions of democratic governance: (im)materiality, connectivity, performativity, and temporality. In doing so, it develops a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance.
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Geopolitics, 2019
This paper starts from the proposition that studies of geopolitics need to address the political ... more This paper starts from the proposition that studies of geopolitics need to address the political significance of spaces above and below the apparently two-dimensional 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. 2
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Caucasus Analytical Digest, 2019
Almost two years after the Belt and Road Forum held in Tbilisi in November 2017, this article pro... more Almost two years after the Belt and Road Forum held in Tbilisi in November 2017, this article provides an overview of the development of transit infrastructure in Georgia and its relevance to the entire region. To challenge mainstream accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative, which are characterised by a bird's eye view of logistical connec-tivity and geopolitical arrangements, the author focuses closely on the construction of one infrastructure project: the Georgian section of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway. This project preceded the inception of the BRI, but has nevertheless come to be described as one of the key components of the middle corridor passing through Georgia. By mapping some of the conflicts and frictions that have appeared in and around the infrastructure's development , what emerges is a much more complex picture of the making of global connections, one characterised by the intertwining of past histories and shaped by the interaction between local events and transnational relations.
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Books by Evelina Gambino
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Edited volumes by Evelina Gambino
La logistica si è recentemente imposta come una prospettiva privilegiata per la comprensione del ... more La logistica si è recentemente imposta come una prospettiva privilegiata per la comprensione del mondo contemporaneo a partire dall’interazione tra mobilità multiple – di persone, merci, capitali, informazioni. Tuttavia, questa prospettiva rischia di risolvere nel presente dinamiche che sono ricorse storicamente in modalità diverse, non lineari e reversibili. I contributi di questo volume si pongono l’obiettivo di mettere in evidenza le specificità storiche e geografiche dei processi logistici. Essi contribuiscono alla definizione di una “logistica delle migrazioni” a partire da casi di studio specifici, proponendo al tempo stesso alcuni elementi utili a problematizzare continuità e rotture storiche all’interno di un confronto tra scienze storiche e scienze politico-sociali.
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The 'Gran Ghettò' is a spontaneous settlement located in the Capitanata Plain, Apulia, Italy. Sin... more The 'Gran Ghettò' is a spontaneous settlement located in the Capitanata Plain, Apulia, Italy. Since the 90s, thousands of migrant workers have travelled to this " shanti town " transforming it in the vastest recruiting centre in the area, providing cheap labour for the tomato harvest. In 2012 Campagne in Lotta, a large political network of native and foreign workers, has established a project in the Gran Ghetto with the aim to break workers' seclusion and articulate collective demands for fairer labour conditions. This chapter is an account of that experience and of the political struggle which was born from it. The account will be structured in two sections corresponding to the two separate, but intertwined, moments of my own militant research as part of Campagne in Lotta. The first section will be concerned with an analysis of the existing conditions of life in the Ghetto: here workers' exploitation will be explained against the backdrop of the intersection between Capital and the many governmental tools for the control of migrant mobility. The second section, furthermore, will be concerned with Campagne in Lotta's political intervention in the Ghetto. The practices of Campagne in Lotta, I will argue, are based on the appreciation of and contribution to informal networks of migrant relations. These networks constitute the infrastructure of a virtual migrant metropolis, connecting migrant's movements on a global scale. In the three years of its existence Campagne in Lotta has managed to become a part of these travelling relations: moving across the metropolis through the accounts of people who have participated in its projects and finding new places of intervention as it's members change location. The embeddedness of Campagne in Lotta in this metropolis, therefore, constitutes its biggest strength and is precondition for a radically different political process to take place.
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by losquaderno_ journal, Niccolò Cuppini, Mattia Frapporti, Maurilio Pirone, Michael Zinganel, nancy couling, Carola Hein, Alessandro Peregalli, Matthew Hockenberry, Andrea Bottalico, Alan Wiig, Evelina Gambino, and Daniela Leonardi
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Holen und Bringen - Werkleitz Festival , 2018
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Online Articles by Evelina Gambino
1tv.ge , 2020
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Into The Black Box, 2020
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Society and Space Blog, 2018
The New Silk Road presents the perspective of a world without barriers, where logistics is not a ... more The New Silk Road presents the perspective of a world without barriers, where logistics is not a means but an end. A world in which connectivity is productive in itself. In this essay I analyse the clashes and frcitions that lie behind the pursuit of seamless connectivity.
Visit: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-new-silk-road-and-logistical-geopolitics
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Talks by Evelina Gambino
Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, 2020
Our lecture performance intermixes excerpts from Tekla Aslanishvili’s documentary ‘Algorithmic Is... more Our lecture performance intermixes excerpts from Tekla Aslanishvili’s documentary ‘Algorithmic Island’ with insights from our fieldwork around the planned logistical hub of Anaklia, in West Georgia, bordering the de facto state of Abkhazia. Throughout the past decade, this coastal village has been at the centre of multiple waves of investment aimed at turning it into a key node for commerce, infrastructure and tourism. The few kilometres of coast that compose the village are today dotted with the material residues of such spectacular attempts at constructing a prosperous future for Georgia. These are architectures of different kinds: institutional buildings, ornamental sculptures, temporary structures never removed, private houses, abandoned building sites, interrupted boulevards and more. Looking at these diverse constructions we speak of the multiple future expectations that converged into this territory. Rather than an unique vision, the future from Anaklia appears as a continuous process of trial and error. It is a future made of different practices, materials, actors, visions and hopes, where positive and negative turns of events are bound together by speculation. Across the globe, corporate, institutional and governmental actors alike, are rejecting the need for a deep transformation of the mode of production, accumulation and extraction that has gifted us with the Anthropocene. Observing Anaklia, we see how this hunt for technopolitical fixes to grant the longevity of profit against an increasingly global horizon of catastrophe has already turned the village into the site of a restless scramble amidst the ruins of what’s left of our future.
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Papers by Evelina Gambino
Books by Evelina Gambino
Edited volumes by Evelina Gambino
http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/losquaderno51.pdf
Online Articles by Evelina Gambino
Visit: https://1tv.ge/analytics/logistical-nightmares-what-can-we-learn-from-the-crisis-of-anaklia-deep-sea-port/?fbclid=IwAR0UsywNldLyiwoIuAORI1YwoOK_EN2WmwrGAgLP_cTLSIwIvF-qVf_we9I
Visit: http://www.intotheblackbox.com/articoli/big-dick-energy-at-the-end-of-the-world-technopolitics-for-a-global-hustle/
Visit: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-new-silk-road-and-logistical-geopolitics
Talks by Evelina Gambino
http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/losquaderno51.pdf
Visit: https://1tv.ge/analytics/logistical-nightmares-what-can-we-learn-from-the-crisis-of-anaklia-deep-sea-port/?fbclid=IwAR0UsywNldLyiwoIuAORI1YwoOK_EN2WmwrGAgLP_cTLSIwIvF-qVf_we9I
Visit: http://www.intotheblackbox.com/articoli/big-dick-energy-at-the-end-of-the-world-technopolitics-for-a-global-hustle/
Visit: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-new-silk-road-and-logistical-geopolitics