‘You will not steal the future from us:’ Resistance, sabotage and refusal along a transalpine infrastructure corridor

The New Lyon–Turin railway line (NLTL) is one of the most contested megaprojects in contemporary Europe, challenged on ecological grounds since the 1990s by the Italian No TAV (No to the High-Speed Train – Treno ad Alta Velocità ) movement in Valsusa, an alpine valley in the North West of Italy. Among other forms of protest, the No TAV movement has engaged in many kinds of infrastructure sabotage, concrete and material acts aimed at slowing down or interrupting the development of the megaproject. As the article details, these forms of sabotage are often framed as actions taken in defense of a future that is perceived as being at risk. Drawing on the archive of No TAV movement-authored texts, the article reviews what is meant by infrastructure sabotage in the context of the struggle against the NLTL, and how future-making temporalities dovetail with spatialities of infrastructural harm and colonization. The article further develops how, in the context of the No TAV movement, the future-making promise expressed through infrastructure sabotage is grounded in the collective circulation of emplaced knowledges and memories of the valley. The epistemic struggle against totalizing truth claims put forward by project promoters also thus becomes a struggle for subjectification, of which infrastructure sabotage becomes a markedly concrete expression.