Infrastructure’s Ambivalence: Infrastructural Ideology from the Late Ottoman Empire to Cold War Turkey

Abstract How do competing political projections, economic motives, and security rationales inform infrastructural policy? How do state actors project infrastructural imaginations into the future when they perceive the present to be under duress? This article examines these questions by looking at Turkey’s infrastructural development from the late Ottoman period to the early Cold War through archival research and fieldwork. In this article, I argue that state actors can clash over the objectives, disposition, tempo, and modality of infrastructural development and opt for policy choices that may seem counterintuitive from the perspective of theories that treat infrastructure as a force multiplier of state power and identify in the state an insatiable and uniform drive for infrastructural power. These clashes are framed as contestations over infrastructural ideology and shows how state elites may consciously pace, manipulate, and even withhold infrastructural development in national territories, particularly in light of crisis perceptions and conditions. It claims that contests over infrastructural ideology arise from the recognition that infrastructure is ambivalent and can accommodate different power projections. In tracing Turkey’s infrastructural development since the Ottoman era and the gradual consolidation of centripetal preparedness as the state’s predominant infrastructural ideology, the article demonstrates how unorthodox forms of infrastructural policymaking under crisis conditions can entrench spatial fragmentations and skew the distribution of resources and life chances across national space and populations.