‘EVERYTHING IS BEING DISTURBED’: Unsettling the Spaces of Global Infrastructure along the Northern Corridor

Abstract

Examining the ways through which global infrastructure projects proceed remains a challenging task given the scale, intensity and speed of these initiatives. This article argues for understanding these transformations through a research approach built around the idea of unsettlement. This is mobilized in three ways: first, to act as a conceptual orientation that is relational and plural in outlook when addressing transforming urban-regional geographies; second, through a methodological approach to research otherwise, that ‘follows the global infrastructure project’, identifying how all kinds of disparate but connected geographies become unsettled; third, through an analytical approach that develops from thick description made in piecing together the (empirical) conditions of unsettlement. This aims to weave together insights across various analytical registers such as the political-economic, social and ecological. Our findings emerge from two projects underway in eastern Uganda as part of the Northern Corridor: the rehabilitation of the Northern Spur railway and the establishment of the Sino-Ugandan Industrial Park.