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Tolls politics and poetics
Abstract
“Why are all these roads being constructed while we are barely surviving?” This is a question that drivers and toll workers have posed time and time again on the Cairo-Suez road. The Cairo-Suez road is one of the central highways in Egypt. It connects the capital to the Canal and Sinai area. During the past few years, Egypt has been witnessing massive amounts of infrastructural projects that are executed by military institutions. This has cost the country millions of pounds. At the same time, the cost of living is rapidly increasing.Thus, the purpose of the massive construction of roads and their maintenance by the state’s military institutions poses several questions, not only about why these constructions are being made, but also about whom they are being made for. Near several construction sites set up by the military, a campaign reads “With one hand we protect and with the other we build.” The military builds the country’s infrastructure with the same urgency that it fights terrorism. It seeks its legitimacy mainly from feeding the narrative of war on terror, just as it did in removing the Muslim Brotherhood from power. It uses this legitimacy to build a military industrial complex that has colonized the economic sphere in Egypt. This paper speaks to the emergent literature on military economy (Saghyeh,2015, Marshal, 2017, McMahan, 2017, Springbrog,2016, Abu Almagd,2017, and Qandil,2017) from an ethnographic angle and attempts to think through this militarization, including how it happens and how it affects the everyday life of the Cairo-Suez road. After six months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted on one of the toll roads of the Cairo-Suez roads, I developed an understanding of the socio-economic fabric of the road and how the militarization process occurs in relation to other local powers. By looking at life on the toll road, as well as the politics that occurs on and around it, whether through new military decisions, new enforced laws, or the making of new deals, we get an ethnographic account of how the military institution negotiates with different political and economic actors. In this paper I will attempt to unpack how the military manages to colonize the economic sphere through a politics of accumulation by dispossession and how the military uses its political legitimacy as the “terror fighter” to create capital and profit?
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
Middle East/Near East Studies