Future making and scalar politics in frontier contexts
Although the frontier concept has been widely criticized, especially Frederick J. Turner’s vision (1894), it has nonetheless been invoked to characterise relations among states, capitalists, and their peripheries (Li 2014, Watts 2018, Schetter and Müller-Koné 2021). Along these lines, Korf and Raeymaekers (2013: 10) define frontiers as ‘the space where territorial and institutional penetration of the modern state has (not yet) been completed’. The term is currently employed to describe the expansion of extractive industries and infrastructure projects into previously remote areas (Bennett 2017, Tsing 2003). Frontiers are characterised by an ‘institutional vacuum’ (Kopytoff 1987: 7), which nestles between the disintegration of established principles of social order and the emergence of new regimes. Frontier spaces are often perceived (or characterized) as ‘empty land’, abounding with real or perceived economic opportunities, as well as open or latent violence (Korf et al. 2013, Rasmussen and Lund 2018). The frontier, as Tsing (2003: 5102) writes, ‘is made in the shifting terrain between legality and illegality, public and private ownership, brutal rape and passionate charisma, ethnic collaboration and hostility, violence and law, restoration and extermination’.
Like many infrastructural projects, energy infrastructures for wind, oil, and geothermal extraction are ‘intimately caught up with the sense of shaping modern society and realizing the future’ (Larkin 2013: 352). As such, they raise expectations and involve people in particular communities of aspiration (Hetherington 2014). This results in economies of anticipation, driven by emerging topographies of (imagined) value, but also fear, anxiety, and insecurity about the future. In such scenarios, indigenous populations, peasants, and pastoralists are often portrayed as ‘victims of progress’ (Bodley 2008). Pessimistic accounts of land-grabbing, oppression, displacement, and disenfranchisement – or ‘frontiers of exclusion’ (Geiger 2009: 198) – prevail in scholarly work.
Frontiers are coproduced by different actors with various and potentially conflicting aspirations, which are negotiated across scales. Because of their institutionally volatile environment, frontiers open up spaces for negotiation about desired futures among local and distant actors, equipped with more or less bargaining power. If frontier situations are thus understood as dynamic processes of future-making (Appadurai 2013), i.e. as attempts ‘to gain control over the future and reduce uncertainties’ (Müller-Mahn 2020: 156–7), then the voices and perspectives of subaltern populations can be included in frontier research. The frontier, then, marks a situation in which different visions of the future compete.
This raises questions about relationships between centre and periphery, local and global, and ultimately, about scalar politics and hierarchies. Some scholars have controversially proposed to remove scale from the human-geographical vocabulary (Marston et al. 2005). While acknowledging that scale is socially constructed, and established through (political) relations, we do not follow this radical proposition. Rather, we follow MacKinnon (2011) who proposes a concept of ‘scalar politics’, aiming to incorporate a processual and historically sensitive perspective that is attentive to the strategic deployment of scale in both its discursive and material expressions. Scale itself is not contested, ‘but rather specific processes and institutionalized practices that are themselves differentially scaled’ (MacKinnon 2011: 22).
This approach not only focuses on interactions between administrative levels (e.g. central and devolved county governments), but also on emergent social practices that may challenge existing power asymmetries. Large-scale extractive projects such as the ones we discuss in this contribution are constituted by multi-layered structures. They are shaped by multiple and often competing actors ‘engaged in an indefinite set of distributed interactions over extended periods of time’, as Harvey et al. (2017: 10) have observed. We therefore suggest that ‘the frontier’ is also a situation that opens spaces for negotiation and new alliances across scales.