Politics of Disavowal: Megaprojects, Infrastructural Biopolitics, Disavowed Subjects

Abstract

Focusing on the construction of Lamu Port as a focal point of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in Kenya, this article explores how megainfrastructures are entangled with processes of life-making and -unmaking, thus producing specific subject dispositions within a state’s infrastructural biopolitics as infrastructure-based capacitation and control of national populations. Analyzing sociopolitical effects of state-led megaprojects, civil society mobilization, and livelihoods of artisanal fishermen, the article develops a theoretical account of a politics of disavowal—a tacit denial of a state-admitted responsibility and support to vulnerable populations that, despite formal inclusion into the state’s development visions, are rendered constitutively absent within biopolitical spatialities of life advanced by the state. Thereby, the article triangulates the binary of bio- and necropolitics standardly deployed in multiple theorizations of (re)production of liberal capitalist life in geographical and interdisciplinary literatures on biopolitics, necropolitics, or politics of infrastructure. It specifically foregrounds how governance of vulnerable, expendable populations does not oscillate between intentional life- and death-making, flourishing and effacement, bio and necro but unfolds as a politics of disavowal—a confluence of formal recognition and material neglect by the state, expressed as a dialectic of presence and absence, inclusion and neglect.