Infrastructural stripping and ‘recycling’ of copper: producing the state in an industrial town in Serbia

Abstract

This paper explores infrastructural disruptions of utility provisioning caused by stealing of copper infrastructural parts in a copper-processing town in Serbia. Such illicit practices of infrastructural stripping were part of copper circulation via theft, cynically referred to as ‘recycling’ of copper, and were incentivised by increased copper price and the specific local economy. Drawing from ethnography among the citizens who reacted to the disruption of the heating provision caused by infrastructural stripping and the disfranchised citizens who illegally recycled parts of infrastructures, I shift so far predominant scholarly focus on engagements with infrastructural material flows and/or their stasis to show how governance hinges on the very liquidation of infrastructural channels. Following the underlying mechanics of the ‘state’ and its uneven distributive politics, I argue that stripping of infrastructures and the consequential disruptions were vital in configuring the state as a desired framework necessary to regulate everyday (infrastructural) lives. I analyse how such process was arranged infrastructurally via socialist and post-socialist patterns, which enabled the maintenance of some configurations of power (from the socialist past) to govern the everyday (infrastructural) lives. The paper contributes to the intersection between anthropological literature on infrastructures and the state and the study of post-socialist infrastructures.