Infrastructures and International Relations: A Critical Reflection on Materials and Mobilities

In a world of accelerated movements, this article examines how infrastructures matter in international relations. We first show that the International Relations (IR) discipline has relegated infrastructures to the background of their studies and treated them as passive tools despite their forcible role in the establishment of the modern state system. By adopting a sociological definition of “the international,” this article emphasizes the centrality of materials and mobilities in thinking about the international and calls for a novel infrastructural lens in the IR discipline. We argue that infrastructures provide crucial mechanisms for forging the distinctions between units that constitute the international as a separate realm. We outline how infrastructures continuously transform this realm through re-scaling and re-ordering spaces, polities, and people. In the meantime, infrastructures are at the heart of social processes, which generate knowledge practices that constitute the international. They inscribe themselves in discourses, produce meaning, and shape identities, and they are thus part of the ideational underpinning of the international. We conclude by advocating a shift in the analytical weight of materials in IR, premised on an interdisciplinary dialogue, and suggest a theoretical and methodological recalibration of the discipline’s treatment of infrastructures.