Bilge O’Hearn Firat

Infrastructures tell important political stories about particular intentions in physical form. Cross-border natural gas pipelines, such as the recently built Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) between the Caspian Basin and Europe, are considered “geopolitical infrastructures” par excellence, which are built to promote interests that go beyond state borders and territories. Without taking “geopolitics” or “infrastructure” as a priori, this ethnographic research project examines emergent political and geographical imaginaries in the European Union (EU) that are invested and materialized in SGC through an investigation of how EU actors imbue this gas infrastructure with geopolitical meaning and signification. Throughout a year-long anthropological research and analysis—including 6-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels—through cultural immersion, semi-structured elite-expert interviews, participant and non-participant observations, and textual analysis of policy and media artifacts, I will collect and analyze SGC-related “geopolitical” stories EU actors tell, in order to capture how elite-expert actors make sense of their role and place in the world through worlding this pipeline. In so doing, this project aims to contribute to anthropological studies of geopolitics and infrastructure in Europe with implications and comparative value beyond.