Gambino, Evelina; (2021) (Re)producing the logistical future: ethnography, infrastructure and the making of Georgia’s global connections. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the making of logistical connectivity. The ethnography follows the project to transform the village of Anaklia on the Georgian Black Sea coast into a major logistical hub set to include a deep sea port, a smart city, and a special economic zone. This development, supported by the Georgian state and managed by a private multinational corporation was commonly referred to as “the project of the century” and understood to be vital for the country’s transformation into a transit corridor, an element of the Belt and Road Initiative that would forge new connections between Europe and Asia. Over the course of the ethnography, however, the project came to a halt. By charting the development and eventual demise of this ambitious infrastructural effort, this research brings together a theoretical and political focus on the geography of logistical capitalism with an ethnographic attention to practices of future-making. This thesis figures Anaklia as simultaneously an index and a product of the various processes that are brought together in the reproduction of what I call the “logistical future”. Two broad concerns run through the analysis. One is the observation that the creation of Anaklia as a future-oriented logistical space required copious amounts of manual, affective and administrative labour, even prior to its construction, by security guards, manual workers, managers, local residents, public relations professionals and others. The uses, intersections and dislocations of these different forms of labour are a central focus of this inquiry. Second, to understand how the village of Anaklia came to acquire the remarkable significance it did, attention needs to be paid to the ways in which infrastructural efforts in the present form as accretions of Georgia’s recent history. The logistical future, therefore, is by no means a coherent, linear horizon, rather it is a container for multiple temporal orientations sutured together through great efforts by all manners of actors committed to make logistics look smooth.

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