The Politics of Connections in Greenland: A Typology of Imperial and Post-colonial Infrastructure Logics

Abstract

ABSTRACT The sum of built infrastructure shapes societies, just as attempts at re-shaping social order involve restructuring infrastructure. Understanding infrastructure is therefore essential to understanding colonisation and decolonisation. Nevertheless, despite an ‘infrastructural turn’, studies in geopolitics routinely proceed without thinking through the concept of infrastructure. To understand the span of infrastructures related to both colonialism and attempts to break free from it, we suggest identifying fundamental rationales informing shifting infrastructure projects. The Arctic region offers a prime site for observing such infrastructural logics and how they interact over time, as they each stand out clearly when shaping the region’s relatively dispersed flows of goods, people, and ideas across space. An analysis drawing from 300 years of infrastructural projects in Greenland, asking from where it is envisioned that which sites should be connected to facilitate what flows and for whom, allows us to identify a typology of eight distinct imperial and post-colonial logics of infrastructure.