‘You will not steal the future from us:’ Resistance,sabotage and refusal along a transalpine infrastructure corridor

Introduction

Since the 1990s, Valsusa, an Alpine valley in the North Western Italian region of Piedmont, has become the stage of one of Europe's most long-standing territorial struggles against infrastructure megaproject development. The valley lies between the regional capital of Turin and the French border and has long been considered a major transport corridor across the Alps (Bobbio and Dansero, 2008). Following the EU's decision to invest heavily in the construction of a trans-European network of infrastructures as part of the Maastricht Treaty, the valley has become a key site for the development of the New Lyon–Turin Line (NLTL).

The NLTL, presented as a state-of-the-art passenger/freight railway line, is firmly considered as one of the cornerstones of the EU-led initiative and is due to be completed sometime in the 2030s. The main feature of the project is a double-barrelled railway tunnel beneath the mountains on the Italian–French border. Each shaft of the base tunnel is set to measure 57.5 km, with an ecological impact to boot for the surrounding region. The Turin–Lyon route already features several fully functioning transport infrastructure links (Figure 1), yet the NLTL is considered a key strategic priority for Italy, France and the EU. Starting from the 1990s, local publics in Valsusa have challenged the priorities set by national and supranational governments, pointing to the vast socio-ecological costs of the project on the valley. These publics gradually came together to form what is now known as the No TAV (No to the High-Speed Train – Treno ad Alta Velocità) movement. The NLTL is thus a prime example of how an infrastructure can become a ‘terrain of power and contestation’ (Appel et al., 2018: 2), even before the infrastructure itself is anywhere near complete. Among the many forms of opposition enacted by the No TAV movement over the years, infrastructure sabotage stands out for its prominence within the movement's repertoire of protest tactics.

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Figure 1.

The New Lyon–Turin railway line (NLTL) route and megaproject, from Lyon to Turin. The middle segment (‘Tratta Internazionale’) corresponds to the cross-border section of the line, which consists mainly of the base tunnel that has been at the heart of the No TAV contention.

This article analyzes infrastructure sabotage in the context of the No TAV struggle, theorizing outwards from the No TAV case to examine more broadly how sabotage intervenes in the construction and imagination of an alternative future. It argues that infrastructure sabotage is articulated in the No TAV struggle as a multi-faceted response to the perception of a widespread threat of infrastructural harm (Kallianos et al., 2023), including adverse ecological effects on groundwater reserves, land and air pollution, public health concerns, the entrenchment of socio-economic dynamics of corruption in public procurement mechanisms and a general sense of political marginalization as a result of increasingly centralized decision-making strategies (Cancelli et al., 2006; Cicconi, 2011; Travaglio et al., 2019).

Examining these material concerns, what comes across most forcefully in the No TAV opposition to the NLTL is the fact that this perception of infrastructural harm is premised on a direct experience and appreciation of certain longue durée dynamics. In particular, the No TAV critique of development understands the harm caused by the construction of the NLTL as a continuation of many other forms of harm that have accreted upon the landscape, as, decade after decade, vast swathes of the valley floor were progressively transformed into a productive hinterland and infrastructure corridor. The net result of this process is that, in many places, the flat and formerly rural lands of the valley floor have become a diffuse ‘sprawlscape’, a fragmented extension of the city ‘that take[s] up vast expanses of territory, like oil stains’ (Nogué and Wilbrand 2010: 641).

The article focuses on the practice and discourse surrounding No TAV infrastructure sabotage and argues that sabotage functions as a way of framing and communicating the impacts of infrastructure, both among movement participants and to wider publics. Infrastructure sabotage in the No TAV struggle works through a lens of ‘infrastructural colonization’, an approach that, for Dunlap (2023), ‘comes from “the soil up”, rooting understandings of socioecological degradation from within habitats’. Further, aside from obstructing or delaying the prospects of the NLTL's development, the article shows that infrastructure sabotage also has its own set of what Aalders and Kioko (2025) call ‘constructive immaterial effects’, which are expressed through what Leonardi (2013) calls the affirmation of a shared ‘struggle for subjectification’ that evades the ‘normalizing regimes of truth’ put forward by project promoters (ibid.).

The argument of this article builds on Leonardi’s (2013) analysis of the No TAV struggle, applying it to the case of infrastructure sabotage. For Leonardi, the No TAV struggle for subjectification is mainly found in two features: first, in the collective, grassroots effort at ‘disarticulating the infrastructural dispositif’ (ibid., 35) according to which ‘infrastructure (in this case the High Speed Train) = modernization = economic growth’ (ibid.). The second feature is what Leonardi calls the ‘extraordinary subjective effervescence’ (ibid., 36) that began to emerge once the opposition to the NLTL became a truly popular struggle that permeated into the everyday life of hundreds of Valsusan inhabitants. The case of infrastructure sabotage, broadly construed, brings both of these issues into sharp relief as forms of oppositional future-making.

In terms of the article's methodology, the case of No TAV infrastructure sabotage is described with reference to the movement's ‘counter-archive’ (Salime, 2022), a sprawling body of texts in which the opposition to the NLTL is ‘documented, recorded and narrated […] through the lens of lived experience’ (ibid., 1039). Specifically, the material that is gathered in this article relates not just to infrastructure sabotage but also to the subjective experience through which the struggle becomes a way of salvaging the future from beneath the rubble of megaproject development in the region. Indeed, if there is a shared horizon that cuts across the many different forms that the No TAV movement has taken over the years, it is the sense that the struggle against the NLTL is ultimately a fight to reclaim a future worth living in. One example of this, reprinted and shared widely in many grassroots publications, is a photo from late 2005, taken from behind police lines during one of the most vivid days of protest in the movement's collective memory (Figure 2). It depicts the moment when protesters blocked police on a bridge in the Valsusan mountains, thus interrupting an exploratory drill from taking place ahead of the scheduled opening of the project's first major worksite. The photo shows scores of activists captured in the heat of the moment, faces twisted in discomfort, pushing back against a wall of riot police officers who are only recognizable by their bright blue helmets. One placard, held high by two hands, reads: You will not steal the future from us! No TAV (Non ci ruberete il futuro! No TAV).

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Figure 2.

You will not steal the future from us! No TAV (No to the High-Speed Train – Treno ad Alta Velocità). A snapshot of resistance on the Seghino bridge, 31 October 2005.

In the years since, the picture has come to symbolize an important affect within the movement, with similar ideas expressed in dozens of texts and transcribed interventions. A selection of these are analyzed in this article, especially those that explicitly mention and articulate the notion of sabotage against the NLTL. In the next section, I situate the NLTL and the No TAV movement in relation to the broader literature around infrastructure megaprojects and grassroots social mobilizations against such developments and their harmful impacts. The third section outlines the theoretical framework used for this article, developing in particular the concepts of infrastructural harm and colonization (Dunlap, 2020; Kallianos et al., 2023) as concepts that are intimately familiar to many participants who have engaged in the movement's ‘struggle for subjectification’ (Leonardi, 2013). I then move onto a brief description of the research methods used, framing the kinds of documents that I draw on and situating them as part of the movement's broader epistemic struggle. Finally, the last two substantive sections consist of a presentation and discussion of a selection of written outputs on the issue of No TAV infrastructure sabotage, focusing in particular on the protests against the worksite of La Maddalena after the site was opened by developers in 2011. The conclusion of the article engages further with the question of future-making within the praxis of the struggle.

Situating infrastructural harm in Valsusa

As Larkin writes (2013: 329), infrastructures are ‘conceptually unruly’, pervasive and ubiquitous built forms of the modern world that ‘provide the undergirding of modern societies [as well as] the ambient environment of everyday life’ (ibid. 328). They are ‘multi-connected socio-technical assemblages’ that reproduce and bring into being ‘forms of agency, modes of conduct and technologies of governance’ (Critical Infrastructure Collective, 2022). Infrastructure thus refers to the nuts and bolts of the modern world, including roads, bridges, water mains, information and communications systems, logistics networks, contracts and pieces of legislation.

For Buier, infrastructure must further be understood ‘as a historically specific form of human-led intervention into the built environment’ (2023: 54), one in which politics, capital and the disagreements that may flow from different constituent groups play a fundamental role. This perspective helps to foreground and situate Valsusa's multi-generational dealings with megaproject development: indeed, the present-day conflict around the NLTL started well before the new train line was first proposed and can be traced back to earlier megaprojects, most notably the cross-border motorway that cuts across Valsusa and that connects Turin to the French border. The presence of these megaprojects in the Valsusan landscape is partly explained by the valley's geographical affordances, mainly its wide, funnel-like opening to the East and the relatively accessible mountain passes to the West, making this route an obvious choice for crossing the Alps ever since the Neolithic (Bertone et al., 1986).

But it was only with the industrial revolution that these affordances began to be truly exploited, and in 1871, the first ever transalpine railway tunnel was built connecting Valsusa with the neighbouring Maurienne valley across the border. At the time, this infrastructure was hailed as a major innovation of the modern age (Bassignana, 2005), shortening the long journey across the Alps from days to a matter of hours. A century later, the railway tunnel was doubled up with a motorway tunnel, in line with the boom of the auto industry. Local roads were soon overburdened with heavy traffic, and before long, the new motorway was built along the whole length of the valley. Yet, it was only once construction work on the motorway began in earnest that local inhabitants and mayors first became fully aware of the environmental cost of the megaproject (Sasso, 2002). In this sense, many of the critical issues that are frequently cited by movement participants in relation to the NLTL – from the loss of land and groundwater sources to the subsumption of local governance institutions in centralized decision-making arrangements, to instances of corruption in megaproject procurement – have deeper, more profound roots in the modern-day socioecological degradation of the valley, which began with the motorway.

Thus, infrastructure can fruitfully be understood as a set of ‘critical locations through which sociality, governance and politics, accumulation and dispossession, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed and performed’ (Appel et al., 2018: 3). The contentions described here concern specifically infrastructures that fall under the category of Great Public Works or megaprojects, a subset of infrastructures defined, following Gellert and Lynch (2003: 15–16), as projects that ‘transform landscapes rapidly, intentionally, and profoundly in very visible ways, and require coordinated applications of capital and state power’. For Flyvbjerg, such projects are best understood as ‘large-scale, complex ventures that typically cost a billion dollars or more, take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders, are transformational, and impact millions of people’ (Flyvbjerg, 2014: 6).

Compared to other Alpine valleys, then, Valsusa is particularly dense with infrastructure megaprojects, owing both to its status as a key transport corridor and, significantly, to the valley's proximity to the city of Turin, Italy's main industrial powerhouse throughout the twentieth century. By the time the NLTL was first proposed in the early 1990s, local elected representatives were counting the ecological costs of the development of the motorway, and any prospect for new development was met with justified concern about the valley's ability to withstand further development at this scale. As Sasso (2002) documents in the first of several chronicles of the No TAV movement, in 1993, when the NLTL began to make headlines, local mayors put out a statement listing ‘Four Nos’ against the NLTL (ibid., 74):

No – because Valsusa is no longer able to withstand other infrastructure projects.

In contrast, for promoters of the NLTL, the main justification for the project is its ‘strategic’ status as a key missing link on the EU's trans-European map of infrastructure corridors (Esposito and Foietta, 2012), a core element of what Jensen and Richardson (2004) call the making of Europe's ‘monotopia’. The concept of infrastructure corridors is central to how EU policy-makers understand the European continent as a space of frictionless mobility that effectively erases many of the existing socio-natural features of the region. Thus, on the one hand, the Turin–Lyon route is imagined as a bottleneck to be resolved, in spite of the existence of several other modern transport infrastructures (including, of course, the motorway) that serve both passengers and freight. On the other hand, the imagination of technological progress that surrounds the new tunnel also somehow erases the physical presence of the Alps as an imposing hard obstacle, enabling, as two leading policy-makers and proponents of the new line put it, ‘the conversion of the current cross-border route into the equivalent of a railway in the plains’ (Esposito and Foietta, 2012: 29). According to this view, the geographical constraints posed by the mountains on the border between Italy and France would virtually disappear once the new tunnel is complete, as trains would supposedly be able to travel as fast as they could in open countryside.

The No TAV movement's contention against the NLTL is primarily related to the marginal position occupied by the Valsusan territory within the broader development of Italian and pan-European infrastructure links. In addition to this specifically local contention, the No TAV movement is also part of a broader wave of contemporary territorial and environmental struggles and shares many features with other similar grassroots mobilizations, both in Italy and internationally. English-language studies have analyzed the No TAV struggle through a lens of political ecology and ecological economics (Greyl et al., 2012), biopolitics and governmentality (Chiaramonte, 2020; Leonardi, 2013), affect and materiality (Laszczkowski, 2019; Laszczkowski, 2020; Laszczkowski, 2023) and the dense interplay between megaproject development, territorial governance and municipal politics (Esposito et al., 2020; Esposito et al., 2023; Soubirou, 2018).

Further, the No TAV movement's persistence in opposing the NLTL has earned it a prominent place in the landscape of Italian grassroots politics, which is also reflected in the large number of Italian-language monographs that focus on various aspects, from the territorial presence of the No TAV movement (Aime, 2016; Chiroli, 2017; Maltese, 2015) to its conflictual relation with the state (Chiaramonte, 2019; Senaldi, 2016). In addition, several comparative works have placed the movement alongside other Italian grassroots mobilizations, including the No Ponte movement against the bridge over the Messina straits (Della Porta and Piazza, 2008), territorial movements against US military bases in Vicenza (Caruso, 2010) or in Niscemi, Sicily (Della Porta et al., 2019) and other territorial struggles like the No TAP movement against the Trans-Adriatic gas pipeline in Puglia (Chiaramonte, 2020).

Finally, the No TAV struggle has also been the subject of comparison with other struggles in other countries, including the ZAD mobilization in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France, the Stop HS2 movement in the UK and the mobilization against the Basque Y high-speed train line in Spain. This work of comparison has been done not only by scholars and activist-researchers (Burballa-Noria, 2018; Mauvaise Troupe Collective, 2018), but also through the efforts of movement participants themselves. This was prominently the case in 2015, when the Permanent People's Tribunal was summoned by the No TAV movement to deliberate on the issue of the NLTL and of other ‘useless, harmful and imposed megaprojects’ (Pepino, 2016; PPT, 2015), including the airport of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the HS2 in the UK, the MOSE anti-flood system in Venice, the MUOS military infrastructure in Sicily, the Bridge over the Messina Straits and the Basque Y high-speed line, among others.

During the PPT hearing that took place in Valsusa, movement participants and experts brought evidence of the environmental harm and abuses of power through which these megaprojects are pursued. In its judgement, the members of the Tribunal pointed to ‘very notable similarities […] in the methods used with reference to such projects, regarding the authoritarian and centralized character of [decision-making], the exclusion of the local population and administrations, [and] the rather heavy police and judicial interventions that are interpreted by many as direct methods to discourage and/or block emerging opposition and protest’ (PPT, 2015: 13) Indeed, one of the prominent issues the No TAV struggle shares with other such cases is the readiness with which the authorities will resort to counterinsurgency tactics to silence dissent and enforce ecological destruction, as Brock and Goodey (2022) argue in the case of the HS2 in Britain.

Theorizing infrastructure sabotage as a struggle for subjectification

On top of the many detailed accounts that have been written on the case of the No TAV movement, there is a further body of texts consisting of a sprawling collection of ‘homegrown’ pamphlets, books, articles, diaries and the like, written by movement participants themselves. I address the methodological issues surrounding the uses and limitations of this material in the next section; here, I focus on the theoretical perspectives that have emerged from a close reading of this material, in particular of those texts that explicitly deal with the issue of infrastructure sabotage.

Across movement chronicles, the events of the autumn of 2005 are widely recognized as the turning point in the struggle, affirming infrastructure sabotage as a possible and even necessary element in the movement's repertoire of protest actions. Acts of sabotage exist alongside many other forms of dissent that include road blocks, mass trespass actions, wildcat marches, collective land purchases and other forms of the so-called ‘paper barricades’. They generally consist in the damaging and disabling of construction machinery or attacks against security fencing and surveillance devices. However, in a wider sense, to sabotage the NLTL can also simply mean a mode of action that impedes construction works from going ahead; for instance, blocking construction vehicles from exiting a worksite may also be considered an act of sabotage by movement participants and by authorities, as seen in the recent case of a French No TAV activist who was summoned to court after organizing a road block near a worksite and calling it sabotage; in this sense, sabotage is in no way understood exclusively as a destructive act but rather as any form of visible, effective and material obstruction of the NLTL's development.

In a similar way to other political groups that have resorted to acts of infrastructure sabotage, such practices within the No TAV movement have ‘blurred the boundaries between abstract theoretical analysis and concrete action’, as Cuyler puts it in his study of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's campaign of infrastructure sabotage (2020: 69). The NLTL is an infrastructure that is as yet unbuilt and unfinished (Carse and Kneas 2019): far from being able to fulfil any of its intended functions, the infrastructure principally exists as an assemblage of loosely connected elements, including worksites, drills, fencing, construction machinery, vehicles, project papers and pieces of legislation. With the ramping-up of the criminalization of dissent in Valsusa, this expansive concept of what counts as the NLTL also includes surveillance regimes and concertina wire, as well as the security forces sent to police the valley's streets, fields and woodlands.

To target any of the above elements is – in this view – to target the infrastructure megaproject as a whole. In this sense, No TAV infrastructure sabotage is not just an act that simply aims to disable or in some way impede the construction of the NLTL; crucially, it is a communicative act that draws specific connections between disparate elements and that becomes the vehicle to make claims (Cuyler, 2020; Zhang, 2023). The role of infrastructure sabotage in raising public awareness or calling for public engagement is an issue that figures widely in the recent critical literature on the topic (Delina 2022; Malm, 2021; Sovacool and Dunlap 2022), pointing towards the fact that infrastructure sabotage may have what Aalders and Kioko (2025) call ‘constructive immaterial effects’ by revealing certain arrangements of power and making them perceptible to public and media attention.

The No TAV framing of infrastructure sabotage explicitly describes actions taken against the NLTL as forms of non-violent direct action in the sense that they do not seek to cause physical harm to anyone involved, be they police officers or construction workers, even when such acts very clearly aim to damage the future prospects of the infrastructure itself. This emphasis on non-violence is partly a response to inflammatory media portrayals, and it treads a fine line between rejecting claims of violent behaviour, whilst also rejecting any clear-cut distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ protesters. It is worth underlining that the No TAV movement has long been a melting pot of different generations, ideologies and political sensibilities, something that is further reflected in a diverse range of tactics put forward in the struggle. In the final instance, however, many No TAV texts reserve the notion of ‘violence’ to describe acts committed by police and security forces against protesters and residents, drawing on extensive documentation of police brutality and overreach (Movimento No TAV, 2012, 2018).

Thus, No TAV infrastructure sabotage is as much about the materiality of the protest as it is about the production of discourse around such acts. For instance, in the winter of 2009–2010, when project promoters initiated a series of exploratory drillings across the valley, escorted by large numbers of riot police, people repeatedly took to the streets to block the drillings from going ahead. After one such protest in early March 2010, police issued a statement accusing protesters of behaving violently, throwing stones at construction workers and police officers. The No TAV movement responded with a press release denying the allegations (Spinta dal Bass, 2010: 32–33), describing the protest as a noisy yet peaceful night-time march. However, lest non-violent protest be mistaken for passive submission, the press release ends with what is effectively a commitment to reiterated sabotage against the project (ibid., 33):

Every time a drill will show up with its retinue of militarization there will be a reaction, as has been the case in the valley for several years now. This reaction has been and will continue to be non-violent, yet very, very determined. Whoever shows up with the arrogance and the intention of devastating our territory and our future cannot presume to work peacefully and without disturbance. Blocks, sieges, marches will continue every time that the destroyers will come to the valley. It is clear that our intention is to stop or slow down the works from going ahead.

A further noteworthy facet of the No TAV movement that comes through these kinds of statements is the fact that the struggle is not primarily framed in ideological terms; indeed, many of the local participants in the movement took to the struggle without necessarily being politicized one way or the other: what mattered was the precise experience of oppression that was felt individually and collectively in relation to the NLTL, from the opening of worksites, to the loss of lands and places, to the marginalization of small, municipal sovereignties in the decision-making process. As Chiaramonte writes, this is not exclusive to the No TAV movement but should rather be understood as an emergent feature of twenty-first-century protest movements: ‘the issue is not about strict ideological models anymore; current protestors tend not to be previously politicized and/or contesting the overall status quo. Differently from in the past – where political subjectivities were tendentially ideologically pre-formed – social movements can now potentially become political subjects from direct experience of exploitation’ (Chiaramonte, 2020: 937–938).

One way of understanding the kind of activist positionality that has emerged in Valsusa in the wake of the No TAV is along the lines of what Dunlap calls ‘infrastructural colonization’ (2020), a perspective that recognizes an ‘infrastructural “colonial present” both north and south of the globe’ (ibid., 113). Thus, the No TAV challenge to the colonial dynamics in the territorialization of the NLTL can be aptly described as an orientation that ‘does not assume that [national] governments accurately represent the claimed populations or territories’ (Dunlap, 2023). This is especially relevant in the case of the No TAV movement, as every party that has been elected to government since the 1990s – even nominally anti-establishment parties that campaigned on a No TAV platform, such as Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement in the late 2010s – have eventually pushed for the development of the NLTL through policy and legislation. Yet, this distrust and scepticism does not correspond to a blanket refusal of institutional politics tout court; indeed, as mentioned above, municipal politics continues to play an important role, not just as far as local issues are concerned but also in mediating between communities and state and regional institutions involved in pushing for the NLTL's development.

The growth in local participation from 2005 onwards meant that the project ultimately ended up affecting the daily lives of a large number of the valley's residents, with thousands of local inhabitants gaining first-hand experience of what Dunlap and Brock call the ‘political ecology of policing’ (Dunlap and Brock, 2022: 10), witnessing acts of enclosure and environmental devastation even as they found themselves on the receiving end of police brutality and criminalization. What many outside observers have found remarkable about the movement is the fact that these acts of violence were frequently met not with submission but with determination, year after year. Italian essayist and No TAV sympathizer Erri De Luca expresses as much in his text in defense of infrastructure sabotage against the NLTL (2015: 25–26):

Utopia is not the destination but the point of departure. It is the imagination and effort to bring about a place that is not yet there.

The struggle for subjectification that has developed out of the lived experience of the No TAV movement has disarticulated the place of infrastructure as a signifier of progress to such an extent that people in the No TAV movement have developed a sharp awareness of what Kallianos et al. (2023) call infrastructural harm, that is, of ‘the ways in which material apparatuses and immaterial assemblages of harm create and maintain long-lasting entanglements with socio-cultural fabrics, environments, ecologies, and political, legal, and economic practices’ (ibid.: 2). Such processes are historically conditioned and are part of the longue durée of infrastructure development, and paying attention to them affords a perspective on the deeper transformations that occur to socio-natural environments as a result of infrastructural development. Harm is not understood as a ‘process distinct from the building and function of modern infrastructure’ but is rather something that is ‘inherent to its broader workings’ (ibid.), seen – in the case of Valsusa – in the opening and expansion of worksites as much as in the presence of an exploratory borehole in the middle of a field, or a succession of heavy-goods vehicles that carry rubble up and down the valley. Sabotage targets these and other sources of infrastructural harm in a dual sense, both by physically obstructing or disabling these kinds of operations and by making their presence visible to public attention.

In this sense, infrastructure sabotage in Valsusa does not limit itself to disabling the material basis for the NLTL's development but also expresses a range of what Aalders and Kioko (2025) call immaterial constructive effects, articulating a sense of the future at risk, drawing lines of conflictuality and affirming the possibility that the future may be otherwise. These articulations are significantly reflected in the production of discourse around the NLTL and the No TAV movement: in this way, the No TAV struggle for subjectification also takes shape as an epistemic struggle that critiques the powerful truth claims put forward by project promoters, mobilizing a different set of knowledges in the process. These knowledges can be understood as ‘situated knowledges’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997) and more specifically as ‘knowledges born in the struggle’ (Santos and Meneses, 2020) that draw as much on scientific, technical and even bureaucratic forms of expertise as on knowledges that are embedded in place and in practices of dwelling. The next section draws on this perspective to frame and contextualize the empirical material used for this case study, before moving on to an analysis of a specific case of infrastructure sabotage in the No TAV movement.

Methodology

Protest events in the struggle against the NLTL do not just occur, they are also narrated, recalled, communicated and contextualized within broader articulations of critique, dissent and analysis. Over time, some of these events become emblematic, like in the case of the photo of the mass blockade of protesters taken in late 2005 on the Seghino bridge (Figure 2). Over time, the recollection and documentation of events in the struggle amount to what Salime (2022: 1040) calls ‘counter-archival practices [that] challenge state records […] from outside official institutions’. The texts analyzed in this article – all of which are in Italian – retell events and chronologies, but, more importantly, articulate a certain structure of feeling, crystallizing emergent understandings of power, conflictuality, refusal and liberation as they are made sense of within a specific conjuncture. These are perspectives that, as Mullenite puts it (2021: 207), ‘are often derived from collective struggles and negotiated among groups’. Even though they usually do not conform to any conventional criteria of scholarly writing, the political and analytic insights that are often shared within such texts are all the more worthy of engagement and acknowledgment for being grounded in situated praxis.

In the case of No TAV sabotage, the material I am engaging with was gathered during the course of a two-year-long ethnographic research project that mainly consisted of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with participants in the No TAV movement. As Shah writes (2017: 47), it is through ‘living with and being a part of other people's lives as fully as possible [that] participant observation makes us question our fundamental assumptions and pre-existing theories about the world; it enables us to discover new ways of thinking about, seeing, and acting in the world’. Tracking the ebb and flow of the NLTL's development between 2020 and 2022, at a time when the project was once again accelerating, my field sites moved from No TAV movement social spaces to assembly halls, from municipal offices to woodlands and from the Valsusan streets to the gardens and orchards of local residents. The main issues that arose from my fieldwork had to do with the processes of infrastructural colonization that were sharply felt by local participants in the movement, and which were met and contrasted by a self-organized, oppositional yet thoroughly convivial politics of place that has learned how to reclaim landscapes and resignify the territory against and in spite of the NLTL.

I also conducted extensive desk research in parallel to my field research. This part of the project consisted primarily of an in-depth (albeit non-exhaustive) review of texts written on the No TAV movement and on the question of infrastructure in Valsusa more generally, with a special interest for ‘homegrown’ texts written by individual movement participants or collectives. The inductive approach that marked much of my ethnographic engagement with these issues also carried over to my approach to textual sources. Indeed, as Mitchell writes (2010: 2), the core element of an inductive approach is that ‘context well described is the development of theory’ (Mitchell, 2010: 2). This approach becomes especially significant with regards to sensitive issues like infrastructure sabotage, guiding my theorizing and anchoring it closely to the empirical material itself, that is, to the perspectives that are expressed from within the field. Put differently, I am not analyzing the concept of infrastructure sabotage in general but rather staying close to the specificities of how it is felt and made sense of in the context of the No TAV movement. In this sense, the theoretical framing of No TAV sabotage that I outline in the previous section – as an issue that is closely connected to questions of infrastructural harm and colonization on the one hand, and to struggles for subjectification on the other – is directly linked to how these understandings are formed from within the movement. Further, given that infrastructure sabotage is a slippery and rather problematic object of ethnographic study, as it usually involves acts that deliberately (and visibly) break the law, this kind of inductive approach also turns out to be the most ethically sound approach available. Indeed, for reasons to do with informed consent, participant confidentiality and potential legal repercussions – especially in light of the widespread, ongoing criminalization of movement participants – this article only discusses such acts of infrastructure sabotage that have already been extensively and publicly written about elsewhere, and theorizes only on the basis of what can be adequately contextualized in relation to published texts.

The texts on No TAV infrastructure sabotage that I draw on are part of the enormous counter-archive of movement-authored texts, which include first-person diaries (Margaira, 2005; Sasso, 2002; Sasso and Giorno, 2008), detailed chronicles on specific moments of the struggle (Askatasuna, 2006; Cavargna, 2016; 2018; 2024; Luna Nuova 2006; Spinta dal Bass, 2010, 2013); edited volumes, often self-published by grassroots committees themselves (Askatasuna, 2012; Celi, 2012; Giudice and Giliberto, 2006; Richetto, 2020), and several essays written by journalists, scientists, legal observers and essayists in solidarity with the movement (Calafati, 2006; Cancelli et al., 2006; De Luca, 2015; Mercalli and Giunti, 2015; Travaglio et al., 2019; Wu Ming 1, 2016).

Not all of these texts deal with the question of infrastructure sabotage. For the most part, the topic is addressed – with varying degrees of explicitness – in texts that have to do with the materiality of protest, like the chronicle Fires in the night (Fuochi nella notte; Spinta dal Bass, 2010), which gathers a number of written interventions around the vigorous campaign of night-time sabotage actions against exploratory drillings that took place in the winter of 2009–2010. Most of the other direct references to the question of sabotage tend to centre around the opposition to the NLTL worksite at La Maddalena, in the municipality of Chiomonte, which was opened in 2011. This worksite was the focal point of the struggle for the entirety of the 2010s, soon becoming the prime target for any action, including sabotage. Many references to sabotage in this literature are in some way a response to a specific action that took place in 2013, for which four people were arrested, imprisoned and charged under terrorism laws after setting fire to construction machinery inside the worksite area. As I show in the next section, the case was widely reported on and came at a time when the No TAV movement was being intensely subjected to what Chiaramonte (2019) calls the ‘criminal governmentality of social conflict’. The No TAV movement largely rallied around the four activists on trial and claimed the right to sabotage as a legitimate form of protest. It was partly this event, and the debate around the legitimacy of sabotage in the struggle against the NLTL, that also prompted De Luca’s (2015) polemic in defence of No TAV sabotage, for which he was briefly (and unsuccessfully) prosecuted on charges of instigation.

‘We were all there that night’: No TAV sabotage at La Maddalena

Once the worksite of La Maddalena was opened, in mid-2011, it immediately became the main target of protest against the NLTL. In the following years, countless demonstrations were held in the area surrounding the worksite, including several acts of sabotage. In reality, however, the area had been a critical site for the No TAV struggle well before the worksite was opened. Indeed, in the weeks immediately prior, the movement had set up a protest camp, dubbed the Free Republic of La Maddalena (Libera Repubblica della Maddalena; Celi, 2012). For police, taking the site and keeping control of it required an extensive operation during which thousands of canisters of poisonous CS gas were fired at protesters who attempted to resist the police operation and the opening of the worksite. Since then, the high level of policing in and around the site has become a constant feature, further enshrined in several specific pieces of legislation that gradually turned the site into an area of national strategic interest; these ad hoc legislations guaranteed a high level of security to the worksite, allowing trespassers to be charged as if they had broken into a military base (Chiaramonte, 2019: 230). As many legal observers have noted (ibid.; Pepino, 2022), this move amounted to a significant politicization of the law as an instrument to enforce the development of the NLTL and the broader control of the territory on behalf of the authorities.

Thus, protesters against the NLTL soon found themselves on the receiving end of a sharp increase in the criminalization of dissent. As Dunlap and Brock highlight (2022), this growing nexus between policing and ecocide, often enacted through various forms of state repression, is a significant feature of contemporary social movements; yet, far from discouraging many movement participants, this state of affairs actually appears to have added more reasons for the movement to fight against the NLTL. In her legal ethnography of the trials against the movement, Chiaramonte (2019) traces how participants positioned themselves in relation to the imposition of the new worksite and of the harsh new forms of policing, resorting, among other things, to acts of infrastructure sabotage (ibid. 90):

We are sabotaging something that should not be there, that is in itself not just illegitimate but also illegal, and a demonstration of the fact that clearly the law is not the same for everyone, because for these people, who have devastated the forests and are devastating our lives, anything is allowed. For us, who are defending a value that belongs to everyone, a right that belongs to everyone, a future that belongs to everyone – because our struggle is also emblematic of many other struggles – our rights are denied.

One of the most prominent instances of the conflict around the worksite of La Maddalena occurred on the night of May 13, 2013, when, during an action against the worksite, four people broke in and set fire to construction machinery. They were arrested and faced trial shortly thereafter, accused by public prosecutors of committing ‘an act of terrorism with deadly or explosive devices, damage by fire, violence against public officials, possession and transportation of weapons of war’ (Movimento No TAV, 2014). They were promptly imprisoned and denied bail during their trial; the No TAV movement, far from distancing itself from these acts, publicly took the defendants’ side, expressing full support for the action. A pamphlet that was published by the movement during the trial frames the action as driven by a vital sense of urgency: ‘the reasons, the sleepless nights, the debates, the enthusiasm, the rage, the joy of those whose heart soars beyond resignation, of those who have learned courage, of those who try and try again, outline a world’, one in which ‘the law is no longer an alibi (nor obedience a virtue)’ (Movimento No TAV, 2014: 7; emphasis in original). Reiterating this sense of a shared subjectivity born in the struggle, the pamphlet ends with a further message of support: ‘we were all there that night’ (ibid.).

During the trial, one of the defendants, Mattia, made a statement in front of the judges, setting the act of sabotage within a broader context (Movimento No TAV, 2014: 12):

‘I have known La Maddalena and Val Clarea since before the worksite for the high-speed rail line was opened. In those woods I have walked, I have slept, I have eaten, I have sung, I have danced. In those places I have lived fragments of precious life with friends who are no longer here and whose memory I carry within my heart.

Discussion

Mattia's statement brought before the court a wide array of references that will have been familiar to nobody but his No TAV comrades. The evocation of convivial moments spent in the forest, of witnessing the devastation caused by construction machinery, and the subsequent arrival of armed forces, represents a narration of the knowledges that, within the movement, give depth of meaning and purpose to the struggle. As well as presenting his own personal motivations to take part in an act of sabotage against the project, Mattia's statement gives voice to an alternative set of situated knowledges that have to do with place and with the perception of change, a temporality of loss in which the prospect of a future appears uncertain. What was once a beloved place has now become a harsh, colonized landscape, one of many spaces of oppression caused by the West's world-spanning military-industrial complex, seen in the presence of the army at the worksite, in the heavily fortified fences and in the official designation of the site as an area of national strategic interest.

A proper discussion of the NLTL's place within the EU's contemporary military-industrial complex and the military motives underlying the project exceeds the remit of this paper, as it is an issue that concerns not only the materiality of how worksites are policed but also the broader realignment of the EU's defense policy, particularly in light of the European Commission's ‘Military Mobility’ (now known as ‘Military Schengen’) initiatives, introduced since the late 2010s (Bardino, 2022). However, it is worth acknowledging that, over the years, this issue has become increasingly prominent for many movement participants, adding an internationalist and anti-militarist dimension to the struggle against the NLTL (Dosio, 2022). Through this kind of framing, the No TAV struggle is rearticulated as one among many ‘global struggles’ that, as Walter Mignolo puts it (2010: 11), are working ‘toward the making of a world no longer ruled by the colonial matrix of power’. This adds a further dimension to the argument that the development of the NLTL is a form of infrastructural colonization, not just because it poses an existential threat to the prospect of a liveable future in the valley but also because it represents a local instance of a broader global exercise of power that is grounded in an imperialist logic of occupation and domination. As mentioned above, the experience of the struggle against the NLTL has enabled many No TAV participants to gain an awareness of these processes, and to articulate dissident, recalcitrant and oppositional forms of subjectivity in response. Through acts of sabotage and other forms of protest, No TAV movement participants target not only the materiality of the NLTL's development and the socio-ecological catastrophes that it produces but also the broader political economy of the project, as an expression of a top-down form of territorial control that relies on the monopoly of violence and on the arbitrary use of law as an instrument of power to impose a certain logic of development.

In the final instance, Mattia's statement in court is no less part of the No TAV struggle than any other more material or embodied action, and it is in this sense that it forms part of a ‘counter-archive’, an epistemic struggle that works through the lens of lived experience (Salime, 2022). The statement, along with the pamphlet written in solidarity with the four detainees, is exemplary of a much broader and more diffused structure of feeling, what I have been calling, following Leonardi (2013), a struggle for subjectification against the NLTL. What makes it a particularly telling example is that it confronts the project on its two key dimensions, namely its effects on space and time. On the one hand, thus, there is the destruction of a landscape and the erection of an architecture that belongs to the world of what Truscello (2020) calls ‘infrastructural brutalism’, in which ‘industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more oil pipelines, more large dams, more roads, more paved surfaces than at any time in human history’ (ibid., 4), enforcing such development projects through the same apparatus of colonial and imperialist rule that Western super powers have historically deployed against the Global South. On the other hand, there is a highly significant struggle over time and temporality: while an infrastructure such as the NLTL may forcefully reinscribe the past – through annihilation if necessary – it also articulates a sense of the future. Against this, the statement on sabotage quoted above reiterates a sense of time as duration, of a ‘woven time’ (Millar, 2015: 35) in which conviviality, struggle and presence are weaved into a ‘single tapestry of the everyday’ that is projected towards the defence of a future worth living in.

Conclusions

This article has examined the spatial and temporal aspects of the NLTL's territorialization through the issue of infrastructure sabotage, drawing on several episodes from the No TAV movement's history of opposition to megaproject development in Valsusa. As I have shown, a significant part of the No TAV movement's driving force has been a sense that the future is at risk and must therefore be protected from figuratively being stolen. This sense is not formed in the abstract but is rather constructed out of experience, specifically the experience of the ecocidal, devastating impacts that infrastructure megaprojects can have on ecologies and communities, in Valsusa as elsewhere. Infrastructure sabotage has become one among many ways in which the No TAV movement has responded to the sense of a future under threat.

Throughout the article, the question of infrastructure sabotage has been approached primarily with reference to the movement's ‘counter-archive’ (Salime, 2022), that is, the vast array of documents through which the No TAV struggle takes form as an epistemic struggle, mobilizing minoritarian forms of knowledge and disarticulating the dominant truth claims put forward by promoters of the new infrastructure. No TAV infrastructure sabotage thus emerges as a praxis, as the result of a process in which theory is translated into action and in which action is grounded in a broader struggle. Following Leonardi (2013), I have conceptualized this struggle specifically as a struggle for subjectification that criticizes the ‘regime of truth’ underpinning the claims in favour of the NLTL (ibid., 39), even as it prefigures and affirms an alternative sense of the future.

Ultimately, No TAV infrastructure sabotage is a productive case study to analyze a broader tension that cuts across this multi-generational struggle, between unmaking the future and remaking it otherwise. And, all things considered, the way to remake the future may be more about rearticulating the present than about aiming for a horizon that risks always being just out of reach. The movement's strong sense of communitas, grounded in solidarity, conviviality and presence, can be understood as the other side of the coin of infrastructure sabotage. As Vachino (2015: 19) puts it in his travelogue on the No TAV movement: ‘there is a beautiful phrase among the men and women in the movement, a phrase of great hope: ‘we have already won’. […] To say no is – in some way – always to say yes to life. No TAV is thus – paradoxically – a way of saying yes to an encounter with the other’. The convivial aspect of the struggle is also captured in statements such as Mattia's evocation of the times spent dancing, singing, eating, spending ‘fragments of precious life’ in a place that no longer exists. For as much as infrastructure sabotage works through means that destroy, disable or otherwise obstruct an infrastructure, the ultimate aim of the struggle is something that is far more life-affirming, a recognition that there is much more at stake than the material harm that may be caused by the development of a new infrastructure, and that the world and the future may already be on their way to being remade.