Logistics from the margins

Abstract

Seaports at global margins rarely feature in contemporary discussions of the logistics industry. This paper brings together recent geographical writing on logistics with discussions of margins as paradoxical sites of inclusive exclusion. Building on fieldwork on the docks of Freetown, Sierra Leone – a port that experts in logistics problematize as a ‘contaminated’ place within the global shipping community – this contribution shows that seaports at global margins are in fact at the centre of key projects of global circulation. While logistics embodies universal aspirations to connectivity, it is profoundly dependent on the uneven terrains of global capitalism. To make this case, this contribution traces the interventions of a global terminal operator and the US Coast Guard to reposition a port at the margins and discusses their effects on logistical and political orders. In doing so, this paper offers a critical perspective on the power geometries of the global logistics industry. Logistics in this view is not only a political technology that creates seamless interconnectivity and transforms heterogeneous places with diverse socialities, political configurations and technological infrastructures into zones of global circulation. The implementation of logistics is also an intrinsically controversial, precarious and contested project.

Adverse articulation: Third countries in China–Australia student migration during COVID-19

“…In these cases, different mobilities mutually reinforce each other. However, interconnections between mobilities may also cause disruption, such as when unauthorized persons enter aircraft or container ships, posing security threats that can disconnect logistics hubs (Stenmanns, 2019), or when undesirable organisms arrive alongside agricultural crops traded across borders (Berndt and Boeckler, 2011). The global higher education economy creates, and is supported by, the international mobility of students, and it has come under threat by the possibility that students may circulate contagion.…”

Logistical geographies

“…These attributes are further highlighted in other research. Stenmanns (2019), for example, explores the challenges faced by logistics company Bolloré to impose the operating procedures expected of an advanced port on the everyday realities of Freetown, Sierra Leone, while Schouten (2019) details how rebels in the Congo use the "nonconventional logistics" tactic of roadblocks to exert the power that comes from the ability to disrupt trade flows.…”

“…These attributes are further highlighted in other research. Stenmanns (2019), for example, explores the challenges faced by logistics company Bolloré to impose the operating procedures expected of an advanced port on the everyday realities of Freetown, Sierra Leone, while Schouten (2019) details how rebels in the Congo use the “nonconventional logistics” tactic of roadblocks to exert the power that comes from the ability to disrupt trade flows. Studying “logistics off the beaten path” in this way can also serve to productively expand what are understood to be logistical actors As Schouten et al (2019:782–3) describe, “smugglers, peddlers, independent truckers, women selling cassava tubers at local markets and elephant riders turn out to be just as skilled logistical entrepreneurs as the high‐paid experts of multinational transport companies and they have the same deeply engrained aspirations to overcome frictions, eliminate middlemen…and increase profits over distance.” Shell (2019), for instance, profiles the use of elephants in the mountainous borderlands of Myanmar as a form of “subversive logistics.” In a landscape that is largely impenetrable by standard modes of transport, elephants and their minders become important off‐road logistical actors capable of enabling both resistance against the distant state but also rescue and disaster recovery operations.…”

States of circulation: Logistics off the beaten path

“…Marginality is relational and constituted from a hegemonic position (Hooks, 1990; Sharp, 2013; cf. Stenmanns, 2019): it is largely seen from the center that the remote hinterland, frontier or interior is savage and violent, ungoverned and disorderly, yet it is often at this relational edge of the state that its own legitimate authority is an open and contested question (Watts, 2018: 2). Despite apparent antagonisms, many interdependencies exist between centers of power and their borderlands, which are often spaces of violent accumulation appropriated in the center (Ferguson and Whitehead, 1992).…”

“…Stenmanns (2019) identifies those tangles in his ethnography of the efforts to turn the port of Freetown in Sierra Leone into another gateway for global logistics. Yet to underscore the continuities of hegemonic logistical projects, Stenmanns cautions, perhaps risks overlooking the exciting other forms of politics that thrive in the margins.…”