Abstract
Andrew Barry’s 2013 book Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline is, on one level, a case study in political geography. Its focus is one of the largest single construction projects in the world in the mid-2000s: the 1760 km long Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. Barry’s interest in this project is not as one might expect on its relation to the geopolitics of the region in the aftermath of the Cold War. Rather he takes us to the details of the project, exploring a series of disputes that erupted along the route of the pipeline immediately before and during its construction in 2003–2006. For a period, these disputes acquired remarkable international visibility. At the heart of Barry’s book is a geographical question: why did these specific disputes come to matter so much, whilst other candidate problems and issues did not?
But if Barry’s book focuses on what we might call the micropolitics of a project, his book also has much wider conceptual ambitions. In broad terms, Material Politics shows us the implications of research in science and technology studies for research in political geography. In some respects, it builds on some of his earlier work. In an influential essay on the conduct of environmental direct action, for example, Barry explored the resonances between the political practice of demonstration and the conduct of demonstration in the history of science. Both forms of demonstration, Barry suggested, entailed the presence of witnesses who could authenticate claims to matters of fact (Barry, 1999). Material Politics can be read as a study of demonstration and witnessing on a grand scale. However, in this case, a demonstration was performed not by environmental activists but by an oil company (BP) in front of a global audience that included international financial institutions, civil society organizations and Western governments. This was an extraordinary experiment in transparency, which led to thousands of pages of documentation being made public. One of the fascinations of the book is that these documents, whatever their limits and flaws, give us an unprecedented insight into the work of an oil company. Barry focuses our attention, in particular, on the formation and transformation of the boundary between what was made public by the company and what was not. This book partly turns out to be about the politics of visibility and the visibility of politics.
Whilst one of Barry’s central concerns is with publicity and transparency, he is also, as the title implies, equally interested in materials and the critical role of materials in political life. In this light, the book represents a distinctive and important contribution to the ‘material turn’ in geography. At the centre of Barry’s analysis of materials and material politics are two themes. On the one hand, Barry is interested in the way that the existence of materials, including pipelines, is bound up with the production of information about their existence. The construction, structure and ongoing existence of the BTC pipeline depend on the circulation of a vast quantity of reports, some of which are made public. As a contributor to the development of actor–network theory, Barry is alert to the agency of materials, but he argues that this agency has to be understood as situationally and historically specific. The study of material politics, he suggests, demands an analysis of the dynamics of what he terms political situations, in which materials play a critical part. On the other hand, Barry is particularly interested in those sciences, including the materials and geosciences that are concerned with the properties and behaviour of specific materials in specific environments. One implication of the book’s argument is that the political significance of these field sciences has been surprisingly neglected by geographers among others.
Although the book has an apparently narrow focus on a single project, it engages with a series of classical debates in the discipline. For example, at the end of Chapter 2, Barry rereads Mackinder’s famous dictum that the study of political geography should be underpinned by the study of physical geography. Material Politics is, above all, concerned with the relation between the political and the physical. But in Barry’s analysis, physical geography is not the stable foundation on which political geography can rely as Mackinder had thought. Rather, the properties and dynamics of the physical (which includes house walls, pipes and landslide systems) can readily become political.
In sum, Material Politics represents an important contribution to political geography and, indeed, human geography more generally. It covers a wide theoretical and empirical terrain and makes compelling connections between disparate ideas, events and artefacts. It is often a surprising read, unfolding in ways that the reader might not expect given the topic and starting point. And it is all the better for that. As the commentaries that follow demonstrate, this is a rich and thought-provoking book that rewards close reading.