Structural violence can assume diverse material forms mediated through physical networks of circulation. Accounts of so-called infrastructural violence emphasize the social injustices effected by infrastructural construction, abandonment, and decay. However, I argue that beyond these well-documented impacts of early and late phases of infrastructural life, infrastructure also metes out violence—fast and slow—in the course of its normal functioning. As I illustrate through examples of water and border infrastructure, violence is not incidental to infrastructure but intrinsic to it. This is lamentably the case because of the spatial, temporal, and social horizons written into infrastructural designs, which I illustrate through examples of water and border infrastructures in the Ganges and Mekong Deltas. Yet, these same factors simultaneously reveal opportunities for producing more egalitarian ecologies, thus pointing a way toward more just and sustainable infrastructural relations.
Kimberley Thomas is a human-environment geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University (Philadelphia). She takes a political ecology approach to address questions about environmental politics, resource governance, and social justice in South and Southeast Asia. Her work on transboundary water governance, international development, social vulnerability to environmental hazards, and infrastructure has appeared in diverse publications, including Global Environmental Politics, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Political Geography, and Water International.