The Life Cycle of the Libyan Coastal Highway: Italian Colonialism, Coloniality, and the Future of Reparative Justice in the Mediterranean

Abstract

This paper explores the role of the Libyan Coastal Highway across history: originally built by fascist Italy during colonisation, in the postcolonial era Libya demanded Italy commit to the construction of a new motorway as part of the reparation process for its crimes. Only in 2008 was an agreement reached. Through it, Italy used the promise to build a new road as a bargaining-chip to secure Qaddafi's cooperation in containing migrant mobility across the Mediterranean. This paper explores the different ways in which the Libyan road has endured as a space and a tool of power by tracing historical and political continuities across time, from colonisation to demands for postcolonial reparations and migration governance. Drawing inspiration from the notion of "coloniality", the paper investigates the colonial continuum expressed by the Italian/ Libyan reparation process, and seeks to posit alternative pathways towards the unresolved question of postcolonial justice around the Mediterranean.

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State, Environment, and Race in Lerma, Mexico

“…I have also suggested that infrastructure can be enrolled in analyses of colonial, imperial, and racial durabilities (Stoler 2016), shedding light on the materiality of these continuities and their lasting effects. Building on existing literature (Aalders 2021; Distretti 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020), I have deepened engagements with infrastructural labour, arguing that this labour is what makes the infrastructures of internal colonialism enduring and adaptive. Crucially, I have shown how this infrastructural labour is itself brought into being through the infrastructures of internal colonialism, in Lerma characterised by the dispossession and proletarianisation of the local population, to which the contemporary Lerma workers are both intimately and historically related.…”

“…Infrastructures are simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by imperial and colonial projects and processes. “Constitutive of” insofar as infrastructures enable the spatial separations that constitute race, class, and gender (Candiani 2014; Nemser 2017; Ranganathan 2022; Salamanca and Silver 2022); the forms of socio‐environmental appropriation and dispossession that underpin capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and state power (Bhambra 2022; LaDuke and Cowen 2020; Moore 2015); and the differentiated mobilities and fixities of bodies and resources across imperial space (Distretti 2021). “Constituted by” insofar as their financing relies on imperial and colonial credit flows (Bernards 2022); their design on colonial/modern aesthetic registers and normative goals (Davies 2021); and their construction and operation on racialised forms of labour, which they have in turn produced (Cowen 2020).…”

“…This racialised labour is both the dead one that constitutes infrastructure (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004; Mitchell 2000, 2003) and the living one that, working in the shadows of infrastructural death (Addie 2021), makes internal colonial relations enduring. In making this argument, I contribute to contemporary scholarship that analyses the endurance of colonial and imperial relations through infrastructure (Aalders 2021; Bernards 2022; Distretti 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020), highlighting the importance of infrastructural labour (Cowen 2020), and the persistence of internal colonialism as an infrastructural process that structures the geographies and sociabilities of postcolonial cities and nation‐states.…”

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…This means that the present making of labouring bodies, and labour relations and structures, exist as a racialised and ‘gendered afterlife of slavery and global capitalism’ (Hartman, 2016: 167). Crucially, these colonial relations are not only confined to the past, but also continue to exist as afterlives or endurances of previous colonial and imperial projects, and as constitutive of colonial presents and futures (Aalders, 2021; Bernards, 2022; Distretti, 2021; Enns and Bersaglio, 2020; Mbembe, 2003; Salamanca and Silver, 2022; Sizek, 2021; Stoler, 2016).…”

Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self: Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity

“…According to this body of work, spatial visions, territorialities, and techno-politics of now ostensibly gone empires are reworked as "imperial durabilities" (Stoler 2016) into new infrastructure systems that materialise interests of global capital (Enns and Bersaglio 2020;Lesutis 2021). As a result, "the grammar of coloniality", as Distretti (2021Distretti ( :1437 notes, endures, for it is forcefully reiterated through landscape-changing infrastructure systems. In a similar vein, Kimari and Ernstson (2020:827) observe that today's mega-infrastructures, built on preceding racialised histories of empire, "engage and extend already existing dynamics of pathological racialisation of Africa and Africans even amidst claims to horizontal 'South-South' cooperation and 'win-win' promises".…”