(Im)possibility of Redress: Mega‐Infrastructures and the Voided Politics of Contestation
Abstract
Drawing on critical geography's recent engagement with negativity, this article intervenes in dominant relational approaches to infrastructure by examining the (im)possibility of redress under mega‐infrastructure development through a case study of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in coastal Kenya. Based on six months of ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023 with displaced fishermen, civil society activists and state representatives, it traces how demands for redress are articulated, negotiated and continually deferred across legal, bureaucratic and everyday terrains of governance. Focusing on four interlinked configurations—law, representational legibility, compensation governance and everyday precarity—the article shows how redress, as a struggle over recognition, livelihood repair and futurity, is simultaneously pursued yet structurally foreclosed by the scalar, social and political‐institutional conditions reproduced by mega‐infrastructure. It argues that, under conditions of ongoing dispossession, relations generate recognition, claims and forms of accountability that are persistently enacted but rarely resolved, thereby revealing the limits of relational thinking that, even when attentive to disconnection and unevenness, presumes relations are analytically stable and politically generative. The article names this patterned failure a ‘void’: not an absence of politics or relation, but a structural and lived condition in which efforts towards repair persist precisely through their own foreclosure.