Chapter Review: Material Politics, Disputes Along the Pipeline

Introduction and Context

Andrew Barry investigates a recent trend of the oil industry, and infrastructure projects broadly, where the principle of transparency is applied to attain environmental and social responsibility. Following the narrative and transparency processes of the BTC Pipeline in Georgia, he addresses why some issues of an infrastructure project escalate within the public and political sphere while others do not. He argues that making aspects of a project transparent creates new areas of dispute, public knowledge controversies, because the process of transparency requires producing new information about material things that are then publicly and politically disputed — creating a political geography of objects that must be analyzed.

            Barry’s lens on transparency and the political geography of materials offers insight to an audience of Caucuses watchers, Human Geographers, and International Relations scholars. As his analysis is tied in heavily to his case study, the work provides practical insights for those interested in the history, development, and human and political geography of the BTC pipeline and infrastructure projects in the Caucuses. Developing his argument beyond the case study, Barry relies on radical democratic and social theories that are directly applicable to his own discipline of Human Geography and that inform International Relations[1] (IR) theory. Barry’s focus on materials and the knowledge production associated with materials addresses a longstanding IR question: where is international relations happening? Barry responds in two directions. First, the social geography concept of scales was already applied to increase the range of political institutions involved in international relations (Sjoberg, 2008: 478), and Barry’s approach expands international relations to include physical spaces and material things (i.e., the BTC Pipeline). Second, Barry enriches the debate on the inherent interdisciplinary nature of International Relations (see Richmond and Graef, 2014); in revealing new truths about arenas classically agreed upon as international relations (inter-state politics, international organizations, transnational corporations) with theories and concepts of Human and Political Geography, he demonstrates the utility of a geographer’s lens for the IR scholar — expanding IR’s interdisciplinary toolbox.

Core Arguments: Knowledge Controversies, Political Geography of Materials, and Transparency as Strategy

            Barry constructs and demonstrates the utility of his political geography lens through an investigation into how the processes of making things transparent and critiquing what is or is not made public are central to the politics of infrastructure, especially oil projects. He begins by identifying that transparency brings new information into the public sphere. Doing so opens the door to public knowledge controversies that scrutinize the quality, nature, and relevance of the evidence and the competence, qualifications, trustworthiness, and interests of experts, witnesses, and methods used to create this new information. Thus, material things become the subject and driver of information and political disputes. A material thing is no longer only constituted by its natural scientific properties; understanding the material requires scrutiny of the information produced about that material and the history and politics surrounding it.

            The relevance and implications of “rematerialize[ing] our understanding of politics” is illuminated through examples in the oil industry. In the broadest sense, Barry considers why certain entities produce certain types of information. For example, oil companies are financially motivated to monitor and publish pipeline corrosion information; corrosion measurement methods and subsequent information are not to understand the pipeline’s material make up or the process of corrosion in their own rights but rather to ensure proper management is in place, oil will flow, and shareholder obligations will be met. Transitioning to his main case study, the BTC pipeline, Barry highlights his core source material, an archive on the pipeline published by BP. The archive “embodies the principles of transparency” but omits information on topics related to social and environmental management, for which the archive was created. The archive is a site of public knowledge controversy, offering insights from the substance of information provided and from an analysis of what remains private. The implications are twofold, the second building upon the first. (1) Transparency, what information about a thing becomes publicly known, will shape the understanding, debate, and critique of that thing and its responsible parties. (2) Therefore, transparency, though often viewed as a normative principle, is a strategy[2]. The processes of transparency will shape what issues become politicized or not based on what information becomes available and what information appears to remain hidden. Thus, Barry argues, analyzing the political geography of a thing requires addressing the processes of transparency, where the political geography is itself shaped.

Concluding Analysis and Discussion

            Barry’s argument is useful for the academic and the practitioner in demonstrating that the principle of transparency is not inherently indicative of good social and environmental responsibility. Further, pointing to the process of transparency as a strategic tool for actors, he also refocuses scholarship on material objects (their political geography), where some truth may have otherwise gone unnoticed. However, the theoretical framework lacks an important and more straightforward conversation on a physical object’s monism, an object’s inseparability from the physical and social space the object inhabits; in other terms, the notion that objects impact and are impacted by their social and physical setting (monism) underpins Barry’s notion that objects are the subject and driver of information and political disputes. Monism is neither a new concept in IR (see Jackson, 2008; van der Tuin, 2016; Haraway, 2003) nor foreign to Geography, where Sauer argues “there is no place for dualism of landscape” (1925: 47). Nonetheless, Barry argues that his intention is not “to intervene in a series of unfolding disputes” and attempts to separate his work form the pipeline project out there. This dualist perspective of his own work is impractical: interviewing over 100 individuals and producing a new narrative on the pipeline will certainly impact the pipeline and all the preceding narratives — as his own theory of public knowledge disputes and processes of transparency affirms. Notwithstanding the monist-dualist speedbump, Barry’s political geography lens of analysis for pipelines and infrastructure projects illuminates a new and worthwhile space of analysis for international relations and critically highlights that transparency is a strategic tool and not in principle a conduit for good social and environmental governance.

Sources:

Barnes, Julian and Adam Entous “How the US Adopted a New Intelligence Playbook to Expose Russia’s War Plans” in The New York Times (23 FEB 2023) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/us/politics/intelligence-russia-us-ukraine-china.html

Haraway, Donna “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” in Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief ed. Yvonne S. Lincoln and Norman K. Denzin (New York, 2003) pp. 21-46

Richmond, Oliver and J. Julian Graef “Citing International Relations: Beyond the Boundaries of Disciplinary IR” in European Review of International Studies Vol. 1 No. 2 (Summer, 2014) pp. 69-91

Sauer, Carl O “The Morphology of Landscape” University of California Publications in Geography Vol. 2 No. 2 (1925) in Foundation Papers in Landscape Ecology edt. Weins, John et al. (New York, 2007) pp. 36-53

Sjoberg, Laura “Scaling IR Theory: Geography’s Contribution to Where IR Takes Place” in International Relations Study Review Vol. 10 No. 3 (Sept. 2008) pp. 472-500

van der Tuin, Iris “Reading Diffractive Reading: Where and When Does Diffraction Happen?” in Journal of Electronic Publishing Vol. 19 Iss. 2 (2016)

Zegart, Amy “Open Secrets: Ukraine and the Next Intelligence Revolution” in Foreign Affairs (January/February, 2023) https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/open-secrets-ukraine-intelligence-revolution-amy-zegart

[1] In this response I use “International Relations” to mean the academic discipline and “international relations” to indicate the activities study by IR.

[2] The value of understanding transparency as strategic is its applicability beyond oil pipelines and infrastructure. Consider the United States’ transparency strategy prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the US intelligence community broke with longstanding protocol to make military and political intelligence available to other states and eventually the wider public — a successful strategy that helped to dissuade doubts and coalesce Western unity(Barnes and Entous, 2023). The transparency strategy was so successful for the US intelligence community that Amy Zegart argues this approach should become the standard in a world where much of the state intelligence community’s work is derived from open source material (Zegart, 2023) — an argument which can extend Barry’s political geography lens to cover not only physical things (our smartphones) but also immaterial technology: the algorithms and code that make up application like twitter, where firsthand accounts of war or guerilla journalism are easily accessible (see: https://www.popularfront.co )