Governing Petro-(im)mobilities: the making of right-of-way for Uganda’s East African Crude Oil pipeline

Abstract

Oil is linked to mobilities both as a substance that fuels movement and as a resource that is highly sought by mobility performances. Crude oil pipelines are not just physical and technological constituents of the commodity’s value chain, they are geometries of power that determine not just the manner and direction of the resource’s movement but also what other socio-material elements become (im)mobilized in the process of their making. In this paper, we examine the practice of governing (im)mobilities in the early stages of the process of establishing Uganda’s East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). We particularly interrogate the creation of the pipeline’s path—known as Right-of-Way (ROW)—as a process of making oil movement possible from Uganda to the international market via the port of Tanga in Tanzania. With the Right-of-Way as an empirical example, we revisit the concept of ‘governmobility’ by posing practical questions that we believe bring new insights into the practice, the art and the underlying rationale of governing (im)mobilities.