Temporal scale-making

This paper argues that global digital technologies and networks are enacted through temporal scale-making practices whereby ideas and meanings of global connection and mediation become emplaced, legitimized, appropriated, and disrupted by a range of local actors. It focuses on Gwadar’s proposed smart port city as it is configured as a critical node in global networks of trade and communication flows. It demonstrates that a focus on temporal scale-making practices enables a more expansive analysis of the vulnerabilities, forms of local relations, and politics of sovereignty that underlie the asymmetries of time and space within global technologies and networks. Pakistan’s Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea is currently under lease with the Chinese Overseas Port Holding Company (COPHC) which operates the port terminal and Free Zone as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of China’s global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Tied to Gwadar’s deep sea are indigenous fisherfolk communities, whose access to these waters is increasingly restricted through a militarized apparatus of violent control. Projected futures of global maritime connection are contested by an ongoing, decades-long regional Baloch separatist insurgency. Fisherfolk in Gwadar have protested the port long before CPEC, but recently their protests have taken up the language and politics of indigenous rights. This study draws on ethnographic research, participant observation, and visual media analysis. It is invested in bringing concerns of political sovereignty and temporal power asymmetries to bear upon digital media studies of global networks and connections

Contentious politics · Futures contract · Global city · Global network · Indigenous · Politics · Sovereignty · Maritime Security and History