The Funambulist 17 Featured

Weaponized Infrastructure

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Weaponized Infrastructure constitutes the 17th issue of The Funambulist. It examines the use of infrastructure (railroad, highways, pipelines, canals, land reclamation, etc.) as a political weapon. “A construction project is worth a battalion” said French General and colonial administrator Hubert Lyautey (1854-1934), a key strategist of French colonialism in Vietnam, Madagascar, and Morocco. This issue’s articles describing the role of infrastructure in colonial projects in Canada (Deborah Cowen), Singapore (Charmaine Chua), Central Asia (Solveig Suess), Kurdistan (Begüm Adalet), and Colombia (Zannah Mæ Matson) illustrate such a strategy. Other contributions describe the geopolitics of narrowness materialized by the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Aden, and the Strait of Hormuz in the maritime globalized capitalist project (Laleh Khalili), the story of Sovietic infrastructural remains in Southern Armenia (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson), the construction of a notion of “infrastructure of intimacy” in the context of the Israeli systematic destruction of Palestinian homes (Sabrien Amrov), and the project of rehabilitation of the toxified Euphrates River between Syria and Iraq (Malak Al-Faraj & Leyla Oz). The guest columns that open the issue are dedicated to the trauma of the Laos War in relation to motherhood (Nay Saysourinho), a critique of the tourism built on the idea of the Black diaspora’s return to Africa (Chanelle Adams), an update on the Tunisian youth’s political struggles (Rami Abdel Moula), and some reflections on the access to knowledge and pirate libraries (Dubravka Sekulic).

Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert
Editorial assistant: Flora Hergon
Contributing copy editor: Noelle Geller
Contributing translator: Ferial Massoud

This issue is now in full open-access. You can read each article’s online version by clicking on the features below.

Past Issues

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Black Indigeneities

Reflecting on Relationships with the Land in Melanesia, the African Continent, the Caribbean, and the Diaspora

The Funambulist 58 Featured
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Return العودة

Twenty Palestinians envision the liberation of Palestine through art, essays, fiction, and poetry

The Funambulist 57 Featured
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The Night

Constellations, Curfews, Rituals, Nocturnal Guerrillas, Sex Workers, Flares, Ghosts, and Northern Lights

The Funambulist 56 Featured 1
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Bulldozer Politics

The Precise Political Order Contained in the Apparent Chaos of Rubble in Palestine, India, Colombia, Brazil, the US, France, Egypt, and Cambodia

The Funambulist 55 Featured
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Asian Imperialisms

Examining Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, and Turkish Imperial and Colonial Formations

The Funambulist 54 Colonial Continuums Featured
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Colonial Continuums

The Space-Time of Persistent Coloniality in Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and Spain