Many countries around the world are having difficulty in meeting rising power demands, and employ quick energy generation mechanisms to satisfy the needs of their populations. One such technology is powerships — repurposed ships that serve as mobile power generators. Currently, the only commercial producer of powerships is a Turkish company that converts second-hand ships into floating power plants in shipyards in Tuzla, Istanbul. Floating power plants attach themselves to national grids, and using fuel oil and natural gas, produce inexpensive electricity for countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, and Indonesia. For instance, the powership in Ghana currently provides 23% of the country’s electricity. Drawing on fieldwork in Turkey and various parts of Africa, this talk will analyze how powership company representatives set up thick relations with governments in Africa, explore the shipyards where ships are manufactured, and investigate the use of a floating power plant in Ghana.

In many parts of the world, electricity generators provide power wherever the official grid does not reach, and where the state does not, will not or cannot, provide connectivity. During the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, small generators became ubiquitous on balconies all over cities like Beirut and its suburbs as war disconnected neighborhoods – and infrastructures and services- from each other. Eventually, larger generators began to appear in Lebanon, and savvy operators with the right connections started to sell subscriptions to people wanting to plug in to these ishtirak systems to keep the lights on. Nearly three decades after the end of the civil war, electricity infrastructures in Lebanon remain a patchwork, and ishtirak systems are an important source of power, not just electricity. This paper traces the emergence and endurance of electricity generator subscription services in Lebanon, and the rise of municipal-scale attempts to manage these services. Rather than imagining how these systems exist in opposition to the state, as a kind of “shadow” network, what are the ways in which these patchwork systems – infrastructural failure, rather than success or even distribution – actually sustain the state? How might we regard ishtirak as a symptom of diminishing modernist imaginaries of large state projects rather than merely the continued “failures” of infrastructure brought about by conflict-era destruction? What happens when we regard ishtirak as part of what sustains the state in its current arrangement, rather than something operating illicitly outside of it?

Drawing on fieldwork in Palestine between 2007 and 2016, and in particular on time I spent with Palestinian municipal engineers working to build sewage networks and treatment plants for the would-be Palestinian state, this paper begins by considering two things: One, that Israeli government officials weaponize Palestinians’ sewage flows, turning them into evidentiary tools for justifying collective harassment and continued Israeli control over Palestinian life. And two, that they focus on what they called Palestinians’ “failure to build” sewage infrastructures. I make three arguments: First, that we can think of “the failure to build” as its own thick, disorienting and molasses-like condition, one that constitutes a temporality all its own. I propose this as a contribution to the anthropology of infrastructure more broadly, especially as infrastructural failure has become synonym and metonym for supposedly failed or failing states and postcolonies. Second, I argue that a failure-to-build temporality is structured by nonsovereignty imposed, for example, by settler colonialism or war. But this temporality takes on its specific moral valence from the specific form that environmental politics takes at the turn of the twenty-first century. This I propose as an engagement with growing efforts in the social sciences and humanities to name the effects of growing concern for the environment, for the planet’s ecological connectedness and propensity to change. And third, I argue that Palestinian engineers tasked to be custodians of Palestinian sewage infrastructures inhabit a temporality that both undermines and is shaped by the dominant, and disorienting, Israeli framing of a “failure to build.” This point lies at the intersection of work that investigates the temporal features of waste and its management, on the one hand, and work that explores the temporal experiences of Palestinians and others living without sovereignty, on the other hand.

Unlike other reconstruction projects in Iraq such as restoring the electrical grid that were commonly recognized as failures, the restoration of Iraq’s marshes has been commonly celebrated by international media, the UN, global environmental institutions, and the US government as “the success story of the war.” Yet the marshes project too was marred by the corruption, unprecedented violence, and operational failures that characterized the cohort of reconstruction initiatives of which it was part. By examining the fieldwork of Iraqi scientists and the directives of international contractors who organized their work in the marshes from 2006-2011, this paper examines how biodiversity conservation became distinctively effective infrastructure for corporate prospecting in Iraq. The paper analyzes how conservation science in wetlands fields facilitated the international reconstruction of Iraq’s economy by creating opportunities for foreign contractors to gain control over and access to Iraq’s waterways and oil fields within the same geological field.