Communal life systems and security in the face of invasive infrastructures

Megaprojects, whether focused on natural resource extraction or infrastructure development, often result in significant changes to the landscape, population, and local economy, frequently causing harm to the environment, as well as disrupting established ways of living and social structures within communities.

This research explored the meanings that local residents attributed to security in the context of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT) project in southern Mexico, a proposed multimodal transport corridor connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. The large-scale infrastructure project — designed to accelerate and expand global trade in the region, while simultaneously boosting the local economy — includes several key components: a high-speed freight train alongside a parallel highway, port modernizations in Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz, airport expansions, investments in oil refineries, a new gas pipeline, logistics centers at both ends of the north-south axis, and the construction of industrial parks along the corridor.

[T]he influx of military units for the defence of large-scale infrastructures into rural regions with their established, collective ways of living and community economies generates insecurity itself.

Contemporary global trade and climate transitions increasingly rely on so-called critical infrastructures that are perceived as essential to the health, safety, security, and economic wellbeing of a nation. Disruption to either construction or functioning of those critical infrastructures tend to be considered as significant threats to the state and its population, which is why progressively, the implementation and maintenance of such projects becomes highly policed or militarized. There is evidence, however, that the influx of military units for the defence of large-scale infrastructures into rural regions with their established, collective ways of living and community economies generates insecurity itself.

Examining security conceptions of residents in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the face of the increasingly militarized implementation of the Interoceanic Corridor infrastructure project, this research found that residents identified security as a cluster of practices which together form the comunalidad life system — a system that enables the sustenance of life. Security articulated here, is based on the functioning of specific, structured collective life systems (different communities establish varying but similar forms of comunalidad), which is grounded in relationships of mutuality, reciprocity and care, through which natural wealth is allocated and collective wellbeing organized. The respondents’ concept of security focused on protecting specific conditions of being-together, recognizing human and nonhuman existence as deeply interconnected with the natural world, an inseparable, co-created system threatened by the Interoceanic Corridor infrastructure project. This research identified forceful expressions of yearning for a secure horizon among Isthmus of Tehuantepec residents, and a certainty that only comunalidad life systems, based on territory and the collective decision-making power over everything that it holds, will be able to provide it.

The interview data analyzed, provides us with a window into an uncharted understanding of security that bypasses the state-centric ideas of traditional security, but simultaneously refuses the anti-security stance of critical approaches. This article reveals Eurocentric bias in security studies and alerts us to the necessity to broaden conventional security frameworks to include the protection of worlds or co-constituted conditions of being together, rooted in the interconnectedness of human, non-human, and natural worlds. Otherwise, the harms inflicted by invasive infrastructure projects remain inconceivable and non-justiciable.

• Susanne Hofmann, is a visiting fellow at the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics