Infrastructural splintering along the BRI: Catholic political ecologies and the fractious futures of Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces

Abstract This article considers the ways in which the material infrastructures of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) intersect with other infrastructural formations, and how the resulting overlaps can trigger processes of what I call ‘infrastructural splintering’. These processes cause infrastructure to be experienced in differentiating ways, creating divisive politics where once there might have been unity. Embracing these politics as an analytical starting point undermines the techno-material stability of the BRI and reveals its more-than-material affects. I illustrate these ideas by developing a case study of the impacts of the China-backed Colombo Port City project on Catholic fishing communities that are dependent upon the aquatic commons for survival. The construction of the Port City has brought about significant aquatic pollution and ecosystem destruction, and public erasure by Colombo’s political elites. Complicating matters is the dominance of the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces, which has become divided by a universalist politico-ecological consciousness imposed by the Vatican, a corruptible local hierarchy, and environmental activists who engage communities via the Church’s sacred infrastructures. By working through these processes of infrastructural splintering, I consider how the BRI has caused Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces to face increasingly fractious futures.