Introduction
Evidence suggests that we are at a pivotal juncture in scholarship on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Research has struggled to keep pace with the seismic implications of China’s growing presence in the world, and has tended to privilege the tracing of high-level policy perspectives and their geopolitical ramifications. Recent review articles are, however, united in their calls for a shift in perspective, with infrastructure being identified as the point from which the BRI can become a ground-up ‘source of theoretical implications and reflection’.Footnote 1 One apparently ‘provocative’ approach that has garnered widespread support is to ‘consider the infrastructures themselves, instead of the states or territories in which they are built, as units of analysis’.Footnote 2 Whilst the first decade of research has tended to explore the ‘role of terrestrial, surface infrastructures such as ports and railways in enabling cross-border connections’,Footnote 3 these can be understood as the BRI’s material effects rather than as the sources of a more expansive ontology of becoming. Foregrounding the primacy of the BRI’s infrastructural formations can, however, pave the way for more critical, and more theoretically attuned, infrastructural analyses. Oakes provides an insight into what this might entail in his call for research to consider an ‘ontology that animates the technical as an assemblage of relations among human and non-human entities’.Footnote 4 This is an ontology that gives rise to a unique techno-politics that circulates and strengthens through the interstices of infrastructural overlap. In this view, the theoretical potential of the BRI stems from interpreting it not as a series of infrastructure projects, but as a techno-material assemblage that implicates both human and more-than-human lives.
My argument is that the BRI is best understood as an infrastructural vortex that brings seemingly coherent infrastructural formations into close contact with one another, causing them to intersect and then splinter. In this view, the BRI becomes a pressure test of how strong, coherent, or sustainable other infrastructural formations are, or might be. Infrastructural splintering creates fissures through which alternative formations can come to the fore.Footnote 5 Although my understanding of infrastructure accords with Larkin’s view that they are ‘objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate’, causing them to be ‘things and also the relation between things’, I also call for a more expansive definition that pushes the limits of infrastructural analysis further.Footnote 6 Taking inspiration from Berlant’s interpretation of infrastructure as the ‘movement or patterning of social form … the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure’, infrastructure can be seen to go beyond the materiality of the ‘object’ and include the subjective realms of vitality, belief, normativity, and ways-of-being as well.Footnote 7 The common denominator that underpins any infrastructural formation is that they are all ‘systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation’.Footnote 8 Consistent with both Larkin’s and Berlant’s understandings are the roles of relationality, linkage, and renewal—analytical ideas that contribute to my understanding of infrastructural overlap and splintering. Importantly, to recognize the overlapping nature of infrastructures—and the processes of splintering it gives rise to—is to recognize that the discursive borders of infrastructures are always fluid and subject to processes of de/stabilization. These are borders that do not just extend horizontally across the world, but also vertically, inwardly, and transversally as well.Footnote 9
I bring these theoretical ideas to life through an analysis of the China-backed Colombo Port City project—a bold attempt at ‘world-class’ city-making that resonates with similar projects of developmental leapfrogging throughout AsiaFootnote 10—and its effects on subsistence-level Catholic fishermen located along Sri Lanka’s western coastline. As a ‘spatial fix’ for Chinese capital,Footnote 11 the Port City project entails extensive land reclamation off the coast of Colombo’s business district, leading to pollution, the destruction of aquatic ecosystems, and the displacement of fishermen and their families from places to which they have, over multiple generations, developed strong emotional and spiritual ties.Footnote 12 Compounding these processes is the role of the Catholic Church in mediating the fishermen and Sri Lankan political elites, and its decision not to intervene in the Port City project or support the People’s Movement Against Port City (PMAPC). Interpreting this situation through an infrastructural lens reveals at least three overlapping, and primary, infrastructural formations: the Port City, the ocean (and the aquatic ecosystems it supports), and the Catholic Church (and its associated institutions, notably schools). As a vortex, the techno-material assemblage of the BRI has been recognized as bringing ‘previously unassociated project sites and non-place-based infrastructural developments into comparative relation’ thus giving rise to ‘new infrastructural connections’.Footnote 13 What the Sri Lanka case reveals, however, is more-than-connection. It reveals how connection can cause splintering and thus disconnection as well. Disconnection can, in turn, create the cleavages through which ‘campaigns to resist incorporation into the widening circuits of capitalism [that] are grounded in a shared commitment to keeping alive “the commons” and the collective practices around them that create and sustain community and its ecological bases’ can emerge as dominant voices in the public consciousness.Footnote 14 The PMAPC is one example of such a ‘campaign’ emerging in response to infrastructural splintering.
The contributions of this article are threefold. One, it seeks to explicate a ‘new’ politics of the BRI that emerges from the ground-up, and which implicates the material, natural, and supernatural worlds. Existing accounts of the BRI tend to assume ‘a relatively conventional approach to politics, and to political power’ by privileging the voices of various state actors.Footnote 15 Contrariwise, by seeking to understand ‘how the BRI is experienced locally’ and the ‘livelihood politics’ it gives rise to, scholarship will be in a position to foreground the environmental, spiritual, and otherwise affective consequences of the BRI.Footnote 16 Two, by situating the BRI as one infrastructural formation among others, I seek to overcome the ‘“horizontal” bias in infrastructure debates’ by embracing the possibilities that emerge from interpreting infrastructure in more ‘volumetric’ terms.Footnote 17 As Woon explains, ‘critical reflection of the “depth” and “height” of BRI activities gestures to the epistemological and ontological potentialities of illuminating lifeworlds that are distinctly three-dimensional’.Footnote 18 These ideas speak to the impact of the BRI on sub-surface ecologies (the ‘depths’ of the ocean) and the transcendence of belief (the ‘heights’ of the cosmos). Three, it contributes to the development of a more-than-human infrastructural ontology that strives to overcome the long-standing ‘indifference to the “livingness” of the earth’.Footnote 19 This way of understanding infrastructure ‘mov[es] beyond anthropocentric familiars [and] generates new analytics and critical openings for the politics of governing human and non-human life’.Footnote 20 These politics are pertinent in Sri Lanka, where the Catholic Church has, like many other religious groups around the world, come to ‘legitimize oppression and provide crucial support to those facing such violence’.Footnote 21
Three sections follow. The first traces the conceptual contours of what I mean by ‘infrastructural splintering’ through two subsections. One argues that, as an infrastructural vortex, any analysis of the BRI must recognize that there is a plurality of infrastructures jostling against each other for influence. The other argues that pluralism gives rise to infrastructural overlaps and splinters that foreground the transformation of infrastructural space-times, and thus futurity. The second section introduces the Sri Lanka case, and considers the ‘infrastructuralization’ of Colombo in the decade or so since the end of the civil war. The third section is empirical, and draws on qualitative data to explore the fractious futures of Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces. Through three subsections, it considers the sedimented infrastructuralization of Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces, infrastructural splintering in response to the construction of the Port City, and the BRI’s more-than-material affects. I conclude by calling for research to foreground the ideas of infrastructural pluralism and splintering, and, in doing so, to embrace an alternative politics of the BRI in Asia and beyond.
Infrastructural splintering along the BRI
In Barua’s call for scholarship to embrace a ‘wider ontology of infrastructure’ we find an underlying desire to rethink the boundaries of what infrastructure is, and what it is not.Footnote 22 Once thing it certainly is not is stable or coherent, or in any way ‘fixed’, even if its material manifestations might, at first glance, suggest otherwise. Recognition of this fact foregrounds the emergence of a more volatile ‘infrastructural ontology’ (to paraphrase Barua; but see also Woods and Palmer),Footnote 23 which starts from the premise that different infrastructural formations do not exist in isolation of each other. Rather, they overlap, and through the overlap they come into contact and collide, in turn creating the conditions for infrastructural splintering. The speed, scale, and material disruptiveness of many of the infrastructure projects that define the BRI create unique conditions through which these overlaps and splinters come to the fore, and create new openings for the political to manifest. In this vein, the very fact that ‘infrastructures settle and habituate routines of social order’ means that they are also ‘frames to recast and rethink the political’.Footnote 24 As materializations of a neoliberal world order, infrastructure development can, in other words, reveal how politics are both situated and resituated in place.Footnote 25 The importance of this becomes apparent when we consider recent criticisms of scholarship on the BRI. Oakes, for example, argues that a ‘more technopolitical framing of the Belt and Road’ can be used to ‘apply an infrastructural analytic to the question of how political power is realised or frustrated, enhanced or diverted, by the distributed and relational nature of infrastructure projects’.Footnote 26 Whilst Oakes recognizes the new political contingencies that infrastructure projects give rise to, he does not consider the extent to which these projects exist in dynamic conversation with other infrastructural formations. As Apostolopoulou asserts, the flows of capital associated with the BRI are not ‘continuous surfaces’ but are modular in that they ‘occur across a network of urban nodes’ that intersect with the infrastructure projects therein.Footnote 27 There is, then, a need for BRI scholarship to recognize the infrastructural pluralism and splintering that defines the localities in which they manifest.
The BRI and the case for infrastructural pluralism
The BRI is intuitively associated with the many infrastructural projects that have come to define it. These are material mega-projects that often sit uneasily with the lived realities of the people and places in which they are found. Observations like these underpin the push for more infrastructure-centric analyses of the BRI, outlined above. Doing so also underpins parallel calls to move beyond the national frame when interpreting the politics of the BRI, wherein ‘the conceptual coherence required for relating the cultural to the political seems much less assured, particularly as analytical complexities begin to multiply’.Footnote 28 An infrastructural lens can sensitize scholarship to these complexities, but so too is there a need to view the infrastructural formations of the BRI not as standalone entities, but as relationally fraught webs of connection and interaction. As nodes of connection, the BRI’s megaprojects can reveal the ways in which the ‘more-than-human enfleshments and enmeshments with infrastructure, where corporeality and substrate meld or the habitat and habits of living beings become synonymous with infrastructural environments’.Footnote 29 Important here is to not only recognize the mechanics of infrastructural pluralism, but how these mechanics can give rise to slippages in infrastructural logic, thus creating spaces of infrastructural (dis)connect. These spaces of (dis)connection are both realized through, and mediated by, the commons. Defined as that which ‘limns a contrast to that which is “private”’,Footnote 30 the commons create space through which infrastructural pluralism becomes a matter of public interest and concern. Not only do they create space, but they also bring to bear a democratization of influence on the outcomes of infrastructural development on local communities. They foreground, in other words, an expansive politics of infrastructure. It is in this vein that the commons
lie at the frontiers, or within the interstices, of the territorial grid of law. They exist as a dynamic and collective resource—a variegated form of social wealth—governed by emergent custom and constantly negotiating, rebuffing, and evading the fixity of law.Footnote 31
As I demonstrate below, the commons are constantly under threat of being enclosed by the very infrastructural formations they serve to connect. Enclosure causes the boundaries of these infrastructural formations to become stabilized, with different infrastructural formations vying for ontological primacy. The bigger point here is that ‘neoliberal capitalism increasingly operates through the enclosure of not only common resources but also relations and imaginaries alienating people from each other and from nature’ to the extent that ‘there is no commons without community, and no community without a commons’.Footnote 32 Offering some empirical insight into these ideas, Blau’s ethnography of herding communities in Ethiopia observes how ‘the livelihood of herders is generally characterized by communing, revolving around the making and remaking of pastoral socionatures’ which in turn causes them to become ‘fluidly embedded in other societies and production systems as well as challenged by overarching logics of resource exploitation’.Footnote 33 This explanation integrates the social, the economic, and the political into one way of navigating, making, and indeed remaking the ‘pastoral socionatures’ within which they are ensconced. Not only that, but the commons is shown here to be a point of connection that traverses—and in some respects transcends—the space-times of everyday life. Through such processes of traversal and transcendence, resolutely grounded, or ‘spatially fixed’, processes of capitalist extraction become moderated by more-than-capitalist infrastructural ontologies. Extending these ideas further is to embrace the relatively novel role of religion in mediating relations of ‘power, interpersonal governance, and the construction of social difference’ under conditions of infrastructure-led change.Footnote 34 I expand on these ideas in the empirical section later, but first I zone in on the analytical value of the splinter and the glitch in the transformation of infrastructural space-times.
The splinter, the glitch, and the transformation of infrastructural space-times
Whilst infrastructural pluralism can be seen to both recognize the complex relationality of infrastructural formations, especially as they vie to enclose, and thus control, the commons, so too does it foreground processes of infrastructural overlap and then splintering. Infrastructures splinter when they are weakened by infrastructural overlap. Weakening, in this sense, is an outcome of non-alignment, or when different infrastructural ontologies come into contact and competition with one another. Although competition invariably leads to one infrastructural formation emerging as relatively stronger, and the other as relatively weaker, so too can it reveal the splintering of otherwise coherent or stable infrastructural formations in response. In more real terms, it occurs when, for example, the logics of capitalist extraction come into contact with the social, cultural, and economic mores of subsistence livelihoods, causing these livelihoods to be internally politicized according to their capitalist (dis)orientations. Or, when the megaprojects of the BRI come into contact with resource-dependent communities, their outcomes can be seen as life-changing opportunities or challenges for stakeholders in these communities. The tensions that emerge as a result are implicitly infrastructural in scope, as they are implicated in the transformation of meaning and value. When infrastructures splinter in this way they become more ontologically volatile constructs that can spur unexpected, and sometimes outsized, outcomes that would not come about without the precondition of infrastructural overlap. Overlap creates, in other words, the conditions through which forces that transcend any one infrastructural formation can start to seep into, and shape, everyday patterns of sociopolitical organization. Going further, glitches occur when splinters translate into tangible effects—and affects—on the daily lives of those implicated in infrastructural pluralism. ‘Glitches’ are, in many respects, an evocation of Berlant’s assertion that
politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure. The repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is … necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself.Footnote 35
Whilst Berlant is hopeful in her suggestion that splintered infrastructures can ‘repair’ or ‘replace’ themselves, caution is needed. This is mainly a reflection of the circumstances in which I interpreted infrastructure for the purposes of this article. That is, in the context of the BRI’s megaprojects and the hegemonic imposition of these infrastructures on local communities, where ideas of ‘adaptation’ and ‘compromise’ might be more realistic outcomes than ‘repair’ and ‘replacement’. Contextual parameters aside, helpful is Berlant’s explanation that, by focusing on the infrastructures of our sociocultural worlds, we can ‘see that what we commonly call “structure” is not what we usually call it, an intractable principle of continuity across space and time, but is really a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement’.Footnote 36 What Berlant accurately explains here is when the continuities of structure across space and time are disrupted by processes of splintering, they become transformed as glitches. This occurs, for example, when the grazing commons for cattle herders are reduced, creating a void that must be filled or worked around. Or when the political ecology of Catholicism does not accord with the political ecologies of Catholics, creating ruptures in the patterning of society. Both are glitches that transform the futures of the people and communities implicated by infrastructural space-time. Taking these ideas further, we can begin to appreciate the potential for a new politics of the BRI’s infrastructural pluralism to emerge. These are a politics that start from the premise that the infrastructures of the BRI are a ‘spatial fix to the overaccumulation problems of Chinese capitalism’Footnote 37 but which extend outwards and shape the spatio-temporal futures of other infrastructural formations too. In doing so, these politics reposition the BRI as a form of ‘transition that alter[s] the harder and softer, tighter and looser infrastructures of sociality itself’.Footnote 38 If the BRI is a form of transition that organizes the world anew, our job, then, is to recognize and embrace the fractures that emerge from infrastructural pluralism.
The BRI and the infrastructuralization of Sri Lanka
Since the culmination of the decades-long civil war in 2009, Sri Lanka—and especially its capital city, Colombo—has been transformed.Footnote 39 More than a decade of relative peace has signalled an era of political stability that has attracted large-scale investment in rebuilding the country’s devastated material infrastructures. These investments have been sought to rebrand Colombo as a hub for global capital, tourism, and entertainment. They have led to the development of spectacular infrastructure projects, of which the most iconic—including the Colombo Port City and Lotus Tower—have been funded by Chinese companies under the remit of the Belt and Road Initiative. In Colombo, this has materialized as the reclamation of 269 hectares of land from the Indian Ocean in order to create an island infrastructure upon which the Port City can be built.Footnote 40 Inaugurated in September 2014 by incumbent President Mahinda Rajapakse and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and built by the China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC), this is a city that was expected to be the largest ever foreign investment in Sri Lanka (costing an expected US$1.4 billion to build, although costs have since spiralled) and including ‘luxury high-rise apartment buildings, shopping malls housing international brands, and a dedicated transportation hub’.Footnote 41 Once completed, it will stand in stark contrast to both Colombo’s existing, working, industrial port (located adjacent to the site) and the existing downtown business and administrative district. The Port City, which has more recently been known as the Colombo International Financial City due to changes in government, is a material infrastructure that evokes an aspiration of how Sri Lanka—or the country’s leaders at least—want the country to be seen, remaking it into the equivalent of a Dubai or Singapore located in the Indian Ocean. The Port City website evokes this aspiration, which is to
develop Colombo Port City as the symbol of the emerging Sri Lanka with limitless opportunities and a promise to offer unmatched potential for business, leisure & tourism and high quality of living, not only for the local inhabitants but also for the countless numbers of the global human family from across the shores.Footnote 42
Although this vision reflects the ambitions of Colombo’s political elites, it is also one that sits uneasily with Colombo’s urban poor who have ‘no obvious place in the representation of the Sri Lankan capital as a wealthy, modern metropolis’.Footnote 43 As much as the attraction of private investment is based on the promise that it can help provide better housing and amenities for the urban poor, so too can it strengthen the cycles of dispossession in which these communities are implicated.Footnote 44 This is especially the case for those who rely on the aquatic ecosystem of the Indian Ocean for survival. Accordingly, since early 2015 mass demonstrations have been organized to oppose the Port City project, comprising fishermen and their families, environmentalists, and various religious figures. Protestors have expressed concern over how large-scale dredging of sand for land reclamation would exacerbate the erosion of Sri Lanka’s western coastline—including coastal areas many kilometres north and south of Colombo—and the ongoing decline of fish stocks that ‘would have a harder time laying eggs and reproducing in increasingly murky and trafficked waters’Footnote 45 and which would make fishing impossible. Indeed, it is anticipated that in Negombo alone, a fishing town located approximately 40 kilometres north of Colombo, 30,000 fishermen and 600,000 engaged in ancillary industries are impacted by the Port City.Footnote 46 In response to broad-based civil unrest concerning national debt and enclosure, in 2015 President Rajapakse was democratically removed from power and replaced by a coalition government led by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe. Promising ‘greater levels of transparency and accountability, and vowing to halt certain large-scale projects, like the Port City’,Footnote 47 the reprieve was, however, short-lived, with the coalition being forced to reverse their promises in order to fulfil their debt obligations to the Chinese lenders. Since then, the project has been resumed with multi-party political backing.Footnote 48
Notwithstanding these macro-scale political developments, the protests continue to play an important role in centralizing opposition to the infrastructuralization of Sri Lanka. Important in this regard is the People’s Movement Against Port City (PMAPC), a coalition of civil society groups, urban activists, fishermen, trade unionists, and religious leaders, which has engaged in street protests, hunger strikes, and even legal action to try and draw attention to the ‘prospect of irreversible loss of ecosystems, harm to livelihoods, and ecological ruination arising from construction of the Port City’.Footnote 49 Equally important is the role of Catholicism in providing an organizational logic through which the protests have been enacted. As Ruwanpura et al. explain
the organizational base of PMAPC is predominantly Catholic fishing communities … The Catholic Church has therefore played a prominent and sometimes controversial role, both supporting resistance and acting as a mediator … The role of the Catholic Church has split opinion and divided more radical and moderate opponents—between those concerned with the encroachment of mining and dredging onto their own livelihood territories and those objecting on a more fundamental level to the underlying logics and political interests driving the project forward without democratic legitimacy.Footnote 50
Whilst Ruwanpura et al. are speaking here of a divergence in opinion, this sense of division goes beyond that. It also reveals a divide between the Catholic Church as a religious infrastructure that has dominated Sri Lanka’s western coastline for many generations (depicted hereafter as the capitalized ‘Church’) and a small group of priests and their adherents who have adopted an oppositional stance to the Church (depicted as the non-capitalized ‘church’). It reveals, in other words, a splintering of the Church into discrete factions as a result of their (in)opposition to the Port City. This splintering is best understood as the most recent incarnation of accretive processes of fragmenting among Sri Lanka’s Catholic community and thus reducing its importance in and to public life. Specifically, the victory of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike in the 1956 election gave rise to a growing number of radically minded priests, and a shift towards anti-clericalism as priests were seen as becoming more financially—rather than spiritually—oriented.Footnote 51 Driving these processes of Catholic decline was the nationalization of schools—which ‘removed an enormous source of Church power and influence’Footnote 52—and the subsequent Vatican II reforms of 1962–1965, which led to the withdrawal of foreign priests and a corresponding indigenization of Catholic clergy. Since then, a potent mix of national and international forces—assertive Buddhist nationalism, the dispossessing effects of the neoliberal reforms of the late 1970s, the civil war and its cessation, and now the BRI—have all caused the Catholic Church to become a complex, multifaceted construct that engages with Sri Lanka’s sociopolitical life in diverse, relational, and sometimes contradictory ways.Footnote 53 I now illustrate these ideas empirically through an exploration of how the Port City development has caused those implicated in Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces to face increasingly fractious futures.
The fractious futures of Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces
The subsections that follow draw on qualitative data derived from ethnographic research conducted in late 2019 and early to mid-2020. This temporal framing is important for two interrelated reasons. One is that fieldwork was conducted prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic that started taking hold around March 2020. In many respects, then, the data and ideas captured below are reflective of a uniquely ‘pre-Covid’ epoch in Sri Lanka’s political-economic history. Two is that in response to a confluence of factors—decades of political corruption, fiscal mismanagement and over-leveraging in response to the BRI, and the lingering economic stagnation triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic—the Sri Lankan economy was plunged into national crisis, to the extent that it defaulted on its debt obligations in mid-2022 for the first time in its history. Taken together, these are transformative events that render contemporary Sri Lanka a very different place from that which I studied in 2019–2020. This is an important empirical caveat that runs throughout the subsections that follow. Notwithstanding these disruptions, I have been visiting Sri Lanka since 2003, and researching Sri Lanka’s evangelical and other Christian communities since 2009.Footnote 54 I therefore draw on a long-standing relationship with the country and its religious communities to offer insight into the contemporary wave of infrastructure-led development shaping Sri Lanka’s urban future.
The research is part of a broader, regionally oriented project that explores the effects of Chinese infrastructure investments on religious communities in various countries along the BRI. As part of the project team, I am responsible for developing the Sri Lanka case study. The Sri Lanka case has so far elicited 71 interviews with various stakeholders located primarily in Colombo (and environs) and Hambantota (another key site of infrastructure investment), and this article reflects the views of a subset of the sample. Specifically, it draws on 28 interviews conducted with fishermen and their wives, and social activists living in Negombo and the Colombo ward of Modara (13 interviews), Catholic priests and nuns involved in the PMAPC (four interviews), Negombo-based reporters and filmmakers (seven interviews), and environmental activists (including a Buddhist monk; four interviews). The interviews with the Modaran fishermen are a focus of the empirical sections below, mainly because they have experienced the largest disruption to their daily fishing activities due to the construction of the Port City. Mostly Tamil and Catholic, the destruction of coral and the offshore dredging of sand have dramatically changed their daily fishing patterns. It has forced them to fish more frequently, and further offshore in order to maintain the same sorts of yields as before the construction of the Port City.Footnote 55 All interviews were conducted by the author in English, the exception being the interviews with the fishermen and local activists, which were conducted in Sinhalese with the help of a local research assistant. Beyond the interviews, I also spent significant periods of time with some of my participants. These informal engagements involved sharing drinks, meals, and photographs; attending community meetings; and watching a public screening of a locally made documentary film that explores how fishermen in a village south of Colombo struggle to cope with the loss of livelihood brought about by environmental change and Sri Lanka’s sociotechnical transition. Given the latent political sensitivities surrounding the Port City project, and Chinese investment in Sri Lanka more generally, data are presented below in a way that obfuscates their origins. I have changed names and obscured places and organizations to ensure anonymity for all actors who participated in this project.
Catholic political ecologies and the sedimented infrastructuralization of Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces
Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces are defined by Catholicism and its inextricable association with coastal fishing communities forged over many centuries. The importance of this observation is threefold, and can help us understand the ‘complexity of the relationship between the ecology and moral or legal notions relating to land tenure’ that the littoral often evokes.Footnote 56 One, it reveals what I term the ‘sedimented infrastructuralization’ of the ocean and the aquatic ecosystems that is home to the Catholic Church and its networks of schools and other services that sustain sociocultural life,Footnote 57 and more recently the Colombo Port City. As much as these infrastructures have accreted over time, so too do they invite critical scrutiny of how they evolve in response to each other. They invite, in other words, the need to understand how ‘“natural” and infrastructural ecologies meld and … the biopolitics and cosmopolitics this melding invokes’.Footnote 58 Two, recognizing the sedimented nature of infrastructure validates the claim that research into the BRI has ‘no neat beginnings nor endings’ insofar as, in Sri Lanka especially, ‘the failure of the initiative to understand and consider critically the local realities and concerns of everyday Sri Lankans could aggravate unstable fault lines’.Footnote 59 These aggravations are covered in the following subsection, which considers the effects of infrastructural splintering. Three, recognition also brings to light the fluid sense of (in)distinction that separates—to a greater or lesser degree—different infrastructural formations. In particular, it reveals the extent to which ‘the human actor is just another actor in a dense relational network with other animate and animate actors’ and thus foregrounds the ‘analytical value of sacred, sentient, and spiritual categories in understanding political action and knowledge’.Footnote 60 More broadly, this gestures to the fertile yet underexplored nexus of religion in/and political ecology, which itself can yield new insight into the ‘social construction of nature’.Footnote 61 I now draw on interview data to illustrate these assertions.
When speaking of their relationship to the ocean, the fishermen I interviewed evoked deeply emotive and possessive claims over it. For them, the ocean is not just a common resource through which they can earn a living, but something that defines who they are and how they find meaning in their lives.Footnote 62 Ajith, a Negombo-based freelance journalist, shared how ‘as a son of a fisherman, I grew up in the surrounding of the ocean, and we had the belief that the ocean belongs to the fishermen’, whilst Amanthi, a documentary filmmaker who studies fishing communities, observed how ‘it’s their whole life, so even without hearing that, the sound [of the ocean], these people do not feel like they are living’. Over time, the encroachment and now dominance of Catholicism along Sri Lanka’s western coastline has caused these sentiments to take on a more overtly religious significance. A fisherman based in the northern Colombo suburb of Modara shared how his relationship is ‘a bond, it cannot be broken unless all the water is gone … God created us, so God will provide a way for me to survive. I am not angry with the ocean.’ Himself, the ocean, and God form a triangle of mutual support that has been self-sustaining for many generations,Footnote 63 to the extent that the ocean is imbued with an immanence that renders it a source of sacred authority. This triangle was reiterated by Father Dilan, a Catholic priest, who shared how ‘in some families, once these people, once these children receive first communion, they go out fishing … Once they receive communion, after that they stopped going to school and go out to sea.’ Being Catholic is not, therefore, a ‘flat identity’; rather it is integral to ‘how people experience the world around them’.Footnote 64
How these subjective experiences extend outwards—and come to implicate both the infrastructuralization of the Catholic Church but also the aquatic ecosystems upon which they depend—provides valuable insight into how the sedimentation of infrastructure can in turn lead to its splintering. As Johnson asks, ‘what kind of person, what subjectivity generates and is generated by a collective relationship to resources, or what is a “commoning” subjectivity’ that transcends individual opinion?Footnote 65 Until recently, the Catholic Church and its associated infrastructures have successfully ‘built unity amongst these people, loyalty amongst these people’, as Father Sebastian shared. Although unity is in many respects a consolidation of power, so too is it an assertion of it that establishes and reinforces hierarchy. Increasingly, however, this relationship is being weakened. Ajith, for example, shared an insight into his grandparents’ generation, which in turn encourages us to think about the anachronistic nature of his comment, and how things might have changed since then:
The Catholic church and [fishing] people, they are really one … if Catholic church has something very special, the priest announces, ‘next day, we have a special programme, so don’t go to sea’, so then entire village do not go to sea. Entire village comes… This is my grandparents’ generation.
Implied here is a weakening of such unity, from Ajith’s grandparents’ generation until now. Father Dilan helped to validate this assumption in economic terms, observing how the ocean ‘is their main source of income for hundreds of years … so for them it’s the mother, that is why these fishermen want to save their mother, the sea is very important for them’. What we can see here is a conjoining of the economic and the spiritual; an alignment that is based on the premise of unity and shared trust in the public good. With natural common property resources, ‘no single user has exclusive rights to the resource nor can he prevent others sharing in its exploitation’.Footnote 66 The shared economic base of littoral life depends on maintaining a sense of equilibrium to ensure its sustainability. Disequilibrium, in contrast, can cause splinters to emerge. Instances of disequilibrium reveal not only a metaphorical division between the ‘Church’ and the ‘church’, but also the pervasive and ongoing influence of the Church in structuring everyday socioeconomic life. For example, Father Dilan went on to explain how ‘traditionally they are very much attached to the Church, they are dependent on the Church leadership’, but now, as I explain in more detail below, this dependence has proved to be misplaced. Ajith gestures towards this sense of unease in his admission the ‘the Catholic Church in [the] village has a lot of control over the lives of people’ citing the examples of marriage—‘when boy and girl get married, we have to do that in Catholic Church, so if you are against Catholic Church, you will not get that opportunity’; death and burial—‘they all want to bury in the cemetery which belongs to the Catholic Church. If you are not a member of the Catholic Church, you will not be able to’; and education: ‘if you want to get into a good school today, you have to have Christian baptism certificate’.
These examples all highlight the broad infrastructural reach of the Catholic Church among Sri Lanka’s Catholic community, but in the same breath so too do they reveal how such reach elicits a sort of ‘control’. Increasingly, this control is becoming incompatible with both the socioeconomic lives of the communities from which it draws strength, but also those factions (aligned with the ‘church’) whose politics might not align, or might even aggravate, those of the Church. Altogether, this incompatibility reveals both the reach of Catholic power along Sri Lanka’s western coastline, and its creation of divisions along politico-economic lines. The point is demonstrated in Father Dilan’s lament that ‘some of the schools in coastal areas … [are] built by fishermen, fishermen’s money … now the children of the fisher community can’t enter those schools because they can’t pay’.
Father Dilan gestures here to a broader politics of fishing communities being left behind in Sri Lanka’s neoliberal transition, which also provides an important framework through which we can understand how the infrastructures of the Port City and Catholic Church intersect. It is through the aquatic infrastructure of the ocean—once a common resource that underpinned the prosperity of fishing communities and the growth and strength of the Church, but now an increasingly divisive construct. These divisions are compounded by the publication of the encyclical Laudato Si by the Vatican in 2015, which called for greater protection of the environment. Father Sebastian was the only priest to translate Laudato Si into Sinhalese for the benefit of the Sri Lankan Catholic community, and shared with me how ‘it’s very important [to listen to] whatever the Pope is telling us. Even the sea resources must be protected, my rights and resources must be protected.’ His expectation was that the hierarchy of Sri Lanka’s Church would be aligned with the Vatican and support the PMAPC in their protests against the Port City, but this support turned out to be short-lived. It is at this juncture that the sedimented nature of multiple infrastructures becomes especially salient, as even a hint of non-alignment can cause splinters to emerge. I now consider these ideas in relation to how the latest layer in the infrastructural assemblage—the Port City—brought about the splintering of those infrastructures upon which it was imposed.
The Port City and infrastructural splintering
The ongoing construction of the Port City did not start the process of infrastructural splintering, but it has accelerated it. So too has it amplified its effects. As a catalysing force, it has caused the commons to become a more bordered, enclosed, and thus privatized construct. Processes of enclosure are reflected, for example, in NGO leader Rohan’s recollection of how ‘they put up certain notices saying not to do any fishing activities, the mining operations are going on’ thus transforming the ocean into ‘state property or capitalist commodity’.Footnote 67 And yet, also significant is the littoral nature of these infrastructural spaces, and how activity in the ocean has knock-on effects for the land as well. Father Sebastian opined that the gradual, yet seemingly irreversible, enclosure of the ocean means that ‘the land is going to be affected … when they expand this project, they will have to put up buildings, they will put up hotels, so the coastal people will be displaced’. Indeed, as much as enclosure can be seen to work in the service of strengthening one infrastructural formation over another, so too can such strengthening lead to the splintering of infrastructure. The aquatic infrastructures of the ocean and its various ecosystems splinters in a very physical way, with sand dredging causing coastal erosion and slumping, and the displacement and destruction of fish stocks. As Father Dilan explained, ‘there is excavation of sand, sea sand, in large quantities … so when the excavation of sand takes place, the soil from this side [near the coast] slips down and the fish swim away from the shallow waters’ meaning the fishermen, as a result, ‘have to go far away into the sea’ in search of fish.
What Father Dilan reveals here is the plasticity of infrastructure, and how it evolves in new directions and morphs into alternative formations in response to the strengthening of one infrastructural formation over another. What has surprised the fishermen the most is the inherent instability of something they once thought to be a stable and reliable source of income. As Berlant explains, ‘objects are always looser when they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize’.Footnote 68 Splintering thus causes this ‘looseness’ to manifest in the form of waters becoming muddier and fish responding by relocating further away from the shore. This looseness is juxtaposed against the relative ‘tightness’ of the fishermen, who must now adapt to such infrastructural fluidity. Before the construction of the Port City started, ‘there is plenty of fish, like if you have in the house, you open the cupboard, you see money; when you go to the sea, you could catch fish’, as a Modara-based fisherman shared with me. Now, however, they face ‘increase[d] input[s] for finding [fish], their time and money and so on’, says Rohan. It is at this point that Berlant’s notion of the glitch becomes apparent,Footnote 69 causing a disruption to the spatio-temporal patterning of fishing activity. In the search for displaced fish, and having to invest more time (and therefore money) in fishing, the fishermen have to take on more risk by fishing further out to sea, and they have to draw on the political resources available to them in order to campaign for some sort of justice. They do so by ‘tap[ping] into legacies of occupation to extend ownership rights and resource justice’ and in doing so ‘project a pastoral social relation of mutual attachment, dependence, or vitality’.Footnote 70
Given the sedimented nature of Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces, the expectation was that the Catholic Church would support them in their campaign for reparation. The Church in Sri Lanka has historically wielded considerable political power and is broadly respected as a religious institution. During the civil war years, Catholic priests provided multifaceted forms of ‘sanctuary’ to Tamil civilians that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) did not dare to challenge,Footnote 71 and have even been shown to act as ‘brokers’ inasmuch as ‘apparently apolitical actors can engage in political and violent arenas’.Footnote 72 The role of Catholic priests, then, goes well beyond that of religious instruction, implicating them in diverse processes of sociopolitical smoothening as well. Moreover, the fact that its physical infrastructure has, over many generations, been built by the incomes of fishermen speaks to the sense of ‘mutual attachment, dependence, or vitality’ that conjoins the religious and the social. Indeed, at the beginning of the project, the Church was aligned with the fishermen in their attempts to halt construction. As Rohan recalled, it was a hunger strike by the protestors that triggered Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith to mediate,
and [he] said ‘OK, we work until the government agrees that they take sand out from beyond ten kilometres [away from the shore]’. So after that, they [the Cardinal] kept quiet. Though they continue to do their mining and dredging and other things close to the shore, Church said that we had done our best so we cannot do anything more.
What Rohan explains here is political lobbying by the cardinal of the Catholic Church, and a verbal agreement that sand dredging and mining would be conducted at least 10 kilometres away from the shore in order to minimize its impact on the fishermen. By many accounts, the Cardinal’s political stature grew in the aftermath of the Islamist attacks of Easter 2019, with him allegedly helping sway Catholic voters to support Gotabaya Rajapakse in the 2019 presidential election.Footnote 73 However, the agreement remains unfulfilled, causing the protestors to start to question why the Church was no longer extending its support to them. As Rohan went on to explain:
we realized that the Chinese company had bribed the Catholic Church [by] repairing one of the Basilica here in Colombo. So, it [cost], like 30 million Sri Lankan rupees, they kept quiet … But people are really having their anger [because] the Christian leaders control them, the Church controls them, the politicians are also silent, and the media is also supportive [of the Port City], so it seems like there is no agitation.
What is alleged here is a Chinese company—the China Harbour Engineering Company—bribed the Catholic Church by offering it money to repair the Tewatta National Shrine in Colombo in exchange for their non-opposition to the Port City. As reported in the Colombo Telegraph,Footnote 74 the roof of the shrine was ‘in a state of decay and needed urgent repair which was to cost Rs 30 Million. The Catholic Church was hard-pressed to come up with the required funds but a Chinese Contractor involved in the construction of the Port City became the messiah to complete the concrete roof at no cost to the Church.’Footnote 75 The anger of the fishermen has been ignited by the fact that they feel ‘controlled’ by Catholic priests (‘Christian leaders’ in the quote above) and the Church more generally, as well as by the lack of concern by politicians and the media. One letter to the Daily Mirror by a group called the Christian Solidarity Movement (CSM) first asserted that ‘our Christian soul should not be betrayed to those Chinese companies operating here with ulterior motives’ before going on to question ‘why the Church leadership did not pause to think why suddenly China has shown special concern for the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka’.Footnote 76 Anger stems from the fact that organizations like CSM and PMAPC, and the fishing families they represent, are being blocked from a discourse that will shape their futures, and they must bear the consequences of the behaviour of a cohort of corruptible priests. The letter goes on to state that ‘fishermen along the coastal belt from Marawila to Moratuwa have incurred grave financial losses and soon this will cause graver social concerns’.Footnote 77 In response, a small group of Catholic priests who opposed the non-intervention of the Church hierarchy grouped together to continue resistance under the PMAPC. They joined with other activists and ‘went church by church … we use the church as a point to get together … We use the church to organise the people, but without priest. Without priest, because priest was always on the side of the Port City’ as environmentalist Asanka shared with me.
What we can begin to see here is how the splintering of the aquatic infrastructure has brought about the splintering of the infrastructure of the Catholic Church, causing it to become divided along the lines of hierarchy (Church versus church), and its physical manifestations—its buildings—being co-opted as sites of community organization and resistance. Indeed, this splintering has caused the Sri Lankan Church’s relationship with the Vatican to become strained, given the directive in the Laudato Si to extend care towards the environmental commons. The CSM letter mentioned earlier states the incompatibility of the Church’s actions with the vision of the Vatican in its assertion that ‘this renovation of the Basilica with the funds of this Chinese company is not at all compatible with the spirituality of the Encyclical Laudato Si of Pope Francis’.Footnote 78 As Heshan, a Negombo-based protestor and fisherman, opined, ‘we have the Church but no Jesus. We have Jesus, all AC Jesus, air-conditioned Jesus’, meaning the priests representing the Church are more interested in luxuries like air conditioning than they are in the people they represent. In 2021—after the fieldwork for this article was concluded—the cardinal was reported to have ‘launch[ed] a verbal assault on the Sri Lankan government over the China-funded Colombo Port City project’ with him apparently claiming that ‘the island nation was being dragged down a path of destruction by those who came to power claiming to protect the country’.Footnote 79 He subsequently went on to warn that ‘the danger is that Sri Lanka will become a Chinese colony’ as the government passed a Colombo Port City Economic Commission Bill, which would give a commission the power to award licences, registrations, and other approvals needed to operate businesses involved in the Port City.Footnote 80 Taken together these insights begin to reveal the glitches that are coming to define the BRI, and its more-than-material affects.
The BRI’s more-than-material affects
More than anything else, what the case of the Port City reveals is the extent to which the material infrastructures of the BRI are integrated with other infrastructural formations. As a result, they take on a more-than-material potentiality that works through the splinters and glitches they create. By ‘making the seabed a cemetery’, as Father Sebastian put it, the Port City triggers what Johnson terms an ‘affective ecology’ in which an ‘ethics of care is extended toward plants, animals, and other elements of the world beyond the human’.Footnote 81 This is an ethics that sits in stark contrast to the ethic of care that the Catholic Church is expected to extend to its congregants. Instead, care is traded for the opportunity to profit from infrastructural overlap, causing the Church to be implicated in the broader logic of neoliberalization that infrastructural development—and the BRI in particular—usually indicates. As Heshan put it, ‘they [the Church] is selling the problem’ in order to benefit from its position in the sedimented infrastructural matrix of Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces. Percy, a Negombo-based journalist, echoed this sentiment in his admission that ‘they [the Church] are not support[ing] people … people [are] giving them, but they are not giving anything to people … they are doing business’. The alienation wrought by these practices serves to elevate the sense of emotional investment in fighting against injustice. In many respects they build on decades of ‘highly impersonal and top-down’ dispossession at the hands of state and non-state actors,Footnote 82 revealing a plurality of state formations that foreground ‘contrasting experiences of dispossession’.Footnote 83 Against such a backdrop, emotions become ‘key in the uprising and engagement of collective action in broad social and political contexts, they are also key and present in the everyday politics of social-environmental grassroots movements defending their commons’.Footnote 84
Exploring these everyday acts of defence can help bring the motivating power of affect into conversation with the more-than-human dimensions of infrastructure. These dimensions include the ‘daily affective engagements of individuals and communities with the non-human natures they relate to on a daily basis’,Footnote 85 thus giving rise to new subjectivities, new splinters, and new forms of political potential. In Sri Lanka, these subjectivities manifest as a form of spiritual power that works in tense alignment with the Catholic Church. Alignment is evoked in Asanka’s observation that ‘they don’t care whether their house break down or something, [but] if something happens to the Church, they shake’, with the Church being an affective trigger that, in Asanka’s view, holds more power than can be found in the material world. Whilst Asanka’s claims appear to be exaggerated, they do reveal the importance of the transcendent in galvanizing protest. Asanka again:
It’s a good point to bring the campaign against the Port City for us. It’s spirituality and the power of the [spiritual] things. Because sometimes, the real awareness, the real political awareness does not work … they don’t care because when there’s something political, and they know there’s a real money power [behind it], they think they cannot fight with them. But when it comes to inside their heart, and through the spiritual, they don’t care about that, they come for the fight.
These are affective ecologies that are rooted in the aquatic infrastructure of the ocean, but which translate into tangible action through the infrastructure of the Church. It is a form of affect that is rooted in the fear of the future, and its increasingly unpredictable becomings. Father Dinesh shared how this fear stems from the fact that ‘once they establish [the Port City], they will conquer the whole area … [as] they are not acquiring the land, they are acquiring the sea’. By enclosing the commons, the aquatic infrastructure upon which fishermen rely becomes increasingly inaccessible to them. He went on to explain in more tangible terms what this means: ‘once they develop it [the Port City] fully, then they will extend certain areas for their business purpose’, causing the enclosure of the ocean to translate into the enclosure of seafront land for business. As Sri Lanka’s littoral spaces become increasingly subjected to neoliberal forces, the futures of the fishermen become increasingly fractious constructs. With this in mind, whilst a ‘key effect of infrastructures is that they hasten the world’,Footnote 86 so too is this hastening effect felt more strongly by some than it is by others. Not all the fishermen I interviewed were alike in their responses to the infrastructural splintering wrought by the Port City. One of the most responsive to the changing nature of the ocean shared how ‘I definitely use the ocean as an investment. Even though I’m attached to it, I try to find out ways to make the best out of it.’ This would involve things ranging from being more disciplined by fishing every day, to embracing illegal activities like laying nets on corals, his rationale being that ‘this industry is going to die anyway … so I use whatever there is.’
Practices like these create and amplify inequalities within the fishing community, but so too do they reveal the encroachment of more neoliberal subjectivities into the domain of the sacred. Just as the Catholic Church is claimed to have profited from the Port City, so too have some fishermen used it to justify a more self-oriented approach to relating to and benefitting from the commons. In turn, given that there are ‘various ways in which small communities manage local resources, control access to those resources … and exercise forms of control which are seen as legitimate within the community (or adjacent communities) as separate sets of regulations’,Footnote 87 the sacred evolves into a more contingent construct that can serve to divide communities as much as it can to unify them. Just as it is used as an affective force that is harnessed to galvanize resistance to the Port City, so too can its legitimacy be eroded by the embrace of a neoliberal subjectivity. In this vein, the fisherman identified above recalled how ‘earlier, when I used to go to Church, I used to pray for a lot of things, but now I am only praying for protection from the things that is happening, for my safety I am praying’. No longer reliant on the Church to provide for the future, he is now reliant on himself. As much as fishermen have been alienated by the splintering effects of infrastructural overlap, so too have those like him become infrastructuralized—that is, to become integrated into the dominant infrastructural logics of the Port City. Integration does not equate to justice, but it does gesture towards a greater sense of resilience towards Sri Lankan futurity.
Conclusions
The BRI is one of the defining infrastructural formations of the contemporary era. It spans countries, regions, and oceans, drawing otherwise disparate entities into a schema of material connection and modernity, whilst simultaneously creating ruptures with the local places and people through which it materializes. It is in this sense that it can be understood as an infrastructural vortex that brings once distinct, and apparently diverse, infrastructural formations into contact, competition, and tension with each other. Infrastructural splintering is, as I have argued above, an outcome of these processes and leads to a new infrastructural politics that transcends the unique settings and projects through which the BRI materializes. It is this sense of transcendence that imbues research on the BRI, or on the places of the BRI, with a trans-local importance that must be more clearly foregrounded in years to come. Just as the infrastructures of the BRI give rise to distinct ‘spatial imaginaries’, ‘extended material geographies’, and ‘significant possibilities for comparative urban studies in and beyond Asia’,Footnote 88 so too do they complicate any static or stable vision of infrastructure as a socio-spatial ‘fix’. Rather, the infrastructural splinters to which the BRI gives rise inject a sense of volatility, contingency, and, above all, possibility into the world. In Sri Lanka, it has caused the ethics of care and protection once associated with the Catholic Church to become a more fractious construct, and for alternative assemblages of support and solidarity to emerge in their stead. What these assemblages reveal is the emergence of an alternative politics of the BRI that implicates various stakeholders in China’s world-building agenda in ways that ‘shift the narrative away from invented geopolitics’ and situates it within the space-times of an Asia undergoing processes of profound and destabilizing transformation.Footnote 89
Funding statement
Research for this article benefitted from the support of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, which is gratefully acknowledged (grants no. C5072-18G and RFS2021-7H04 coordinated by David A. Palmer, HKIHSS, University of Hong Kong).
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Open access
