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On dammed landscapes and invasive infrastructures
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Gluhovic, Milija (2023) On dammed landscapes and invasive infrastructures. Performance Research, 28 (3). pp. 12-21. doi:10.1080/13528165.2023.2272491 ISSN 1352-8165.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2272491
Abstract
In this article I turn my attention to two hydropower plants, HPP Dabar and HPP Nevesinje, part of the massive Upper Horizons scheme, which is currently the largest infrastructural project in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Built by the China Energy Gezhouba and financed through a large loan from the Export–Import Bank of China, the enterprise forms a part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an unprecedented global development programme that involves nearly half of the world’s countries. The project is being built on the Zalomka, one of the largest sinking rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the world, and its potential impacts are hotly debated and may be extremely far reaching. As Rob Nixon has argued, the mega-dam projects in many postcolonial nations have ‘depended’ on both physical structure and metaphorical discourse on ‘submergence’: of ‘disposable people and ecosystems, but also on the submerged structures of dependence that lay beneath the flamboyant engineering miracles’ (2011: 167). Drawing on these reflections and insights from the energy humanities, blue humanities and infrastructure studies, I consider dams as concretizations that ‘harness, produce, materialise, and symbolise’ (neo)colonial power relations (Max Haiven (2013) ‘The dammed of the Earth: Reading the mega-dam for the political unconscious of globalization’, in Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis (eds) Thinking with Water, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press). Thus, from this perspective, this infrastructural project could be seen not only as ‘Chinese invasion’ through the Belt and Road Initiative, but also an invasion of nature by the nation state, often constituted as the necessary means to pursue a view of national and regional integration towards globalized modernity. Finally, I discuss an invasion of the dominant narrative by resistance, turning attention to the anti-damming intersectional and coalitional work in the Balkans, which includes protests, marches, forums, artistic interventions, and legal pressure aimed at stopping both local and the Chinese state-owned companies from dredging and blocking the rivers. Intervening in the normalized view of the extractive zone – the article argues – these acts of resistance form part of a broad struggle against what the anthropologist Anne Spice calls ‘invasive infrastructures’ (2018) that numerous communities are fighting against in the region (‘Fighting invasive infrastructures’, Environment and Society 9: 40–56).
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering | ||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > Theatre and Performance Studies | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Hydroelectric power plants -- Social aspects, Hydroelectric power plants -- Environmental aspects -- Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hydroelectric power plants -- Bosnia and Herzegovina | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Performance Research | ||||||||
Publisher: | Routledge | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1352-8165 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 2023 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 28 | ||||||||
Number: | 3 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 12-21 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1080/13528165.2023.2272491 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Re-use Statement: | This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Research on 29 January 2024, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/[Article DOI].” | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Description: | Issue 'On Invasion' issue editors: Helena Grehan and Miriam Haughton |
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Date of first compliant deposit: | 6 December 2023 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 30 January 2024 | ||||||||
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