Redundancy, Resilience, Repair: Infrastructural Effects in Borderland Spaces

This paper develops a dialogue between recent scholarship on Asian borderlands, infrastructure, and Sino-Indian geopolitical competition. The idea of “infrastructural effects” helps articulate how the ideational and material terrain on which competition between India and China occurs can be understood as an uneven Himalayan borderland through which the two states are both separated and connected. Drawing upon the polyvalent meanings embodied in the concepts of redundancy, resilience, and repair, we use these terms as organizing tropes through which to develop our analysis of infrastructure's position at the intersection of the material and the social. With an empirical focus on Northeast India and Nepal, we highlight how the varied effects of temporality, materiality, and spatiality shape the discourses and practices of infrastructure in borderland spaces.