'A Stretched-Out Hand between Europe and Asia'. Logistical Infrastructure and National Imaginations in Contemporary Georgia.

This project examines the on-going infrastructural reconstruction of post-soviet Georgia, focusing on the emerging port town of Anaklia. Anaklia is at the centre of ambitious national and foreign investment aimed at turning this once peripheral coastal village into a trade and transport hub with a global reach. Infrastructures, I contend, have been central to the formulation of discourses on Georgian identity since the early development nationalist movements in the 19th century. Prominent writers such as Ilia Chavchavadze, considered the founder of Georgian nation, and ethnographers like Alexander Kazbegi have constructed their narratives around and against the colonial infrastructures of the Russian empire such a s the Georgian Military Road (Manning 2012). Similarly, recent infrastructural investments have been central to the elaboration of new understanding of the nation after Soviet collapse. However, recent scholarship on the country - with a few exceptions (German 2008; Barry 2013; Charaia and Papava 2014) - has ignored infrastructural projects taking place outside of the capital, overseeing their double significance as material and discursive development. Through an ethnography of the port of Anaklia and the narratives that surround it, this project proposes to assess the multiple ways in which national culture is shaped, contested and transformed by infrastructural networks. This project is original in two ways. First, by focusing on a critical point of an infrastructure that exceed national boundaries the project will bridge the gap between the ethnographic study of economic life and the analysis of macro economic phenomena. Second, by focusing on infrastructure, the project offers a much need corrective to a tendency to focus on ethnic and international conflict in studies of the Caucasus.
This project responds to Megoran's invitation to 're-people political geography' (2006: 625). Actors, as Koopman suggests, are to be found across society, including industry professionals, officials, activists, and workers whose practices materialise a form of geopolitics which is overseen through a solely discursive approach (2011). Through a period of field research, therefore, I intend to trace the competing narratives that arise in relation to Anaklia's development and the different actors that produce and contest them (cf Reeves 2014). My research will rely on different qualitative methodologies. These are: participant observation in person and online, interviews (structured and semi-structured) and textual analysis of reports and websites. During a 10- month field research I will divide my time between Anaklia and Tbilisi. This will allow me to trace the interplay between different forms of resistance and imagination in the port's construction. In Tbilisi, I aim to interview the managers of the companies of the Anaklia Development Consortium, given their status and difficulty to gain access, structured interviews will be my main source of data. In parallel, I will perform periods of participant observation alongside activist groups, such as Green Fist, a Tbilisi-based collective currently organising workers in key logistics sites. During these periods, I will participate in meetings and political actions. To complement my observations, I will perform individual and collective semi-structured interviews with the group members. In Anaklia, I will interview workers employed in the construction sites managed by the Consortium and, in the summer, those employed in the hospitality sector. The first hand data collection in both sites will be complemented by the textual analysis of the material produced by different stakeholders and their online interactions. Finally, analysis of current and past news articles, business brochures, archival material regarding the investment in Anaklia, institutional and independent reports will allow me to develop a genealogical account of the narratives around Anaklia's development.