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War and the Making of Logistics and Transport Infrastructure in the Gulf
Abstract
Bruce Robbins has written that “Infrastructure needs to be made visible, in order to see how our present landscape is the product of past projects, past struggles.” This paper makes visible crucial transport infrastructures in Kuwait and excavates their emergence in war and contention, and their embedding in webs of exploitation and conflict that traverse the world, with nodes in the US and in the Gulf. Significant works of historical sociology have delineated the mechanisms through which warfare as social and political practice, and militaries as vast and powerful institutions, transform social and political relations over time and shape the contours of states, nations, genders, “races”, rights, and social stratification (Abdel-Malek 1968; Ayubi 1996; Barkawi 2006; Enloe 1989; Heydemann ed. 2000; Kandil 2012; Mann 1986; 1993; 2003; Massad 2001; Tilly 1993). I expand on these works by examining the conjuncture of military expansion and capital accumulation in the making of transport and logistics infrastructure in Kuwait, not only “the US Government’s largest military logistics hub in the world” but also a significant transport entrepôt in its own right. In interrogating the relations of US militaries with large commercial firms (headquartered both in the region and beyond) that provide strategic mobility and logistical infrastructures, I view the role of private enterprise in the tertiary sector as an adjunct to the economic machinery of the military. Given that Kuwait has been the staging ground for the War on Iraq, a number of significant logistics firms have emerged to take advantage of such large-scale movement of personnel and materiel. Among them, Agility is notable, both because of its massive size, the fact that it was the second largest recipient of US contracts in Iraq, and that it has parlayed its US military contracts into a global commercial reach which now sees it finding new markets in Africa and China. I analyse how a boom in commercial logistics activity as a result of US military presence or decamping can influence local commercial organisation and urban infrastructure (ports, warehousing, roads, etc.) in the countries that serve as US hosts. I argue that this confluence of transnational commerce, US military presence, and local government coercion gives a more comprehensive sense of the broader sociological effects of how war is “productive” -in countries that have served as battlefields, and in the region as a whole.
Discipline
International Relations/Affairs
Geographic Area
Gulf
Sub Area
None