In Material Politics, author Andrew Barry reveals that as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins, and impact.

Series Editors’ Preface viii List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgements x Abbreviations xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 The Georgian Route: Between Political and Physical Geography 31 3 Transparency ’ s Witness 57 4 Ethical Performances 75 5 The Affected Public 95 6 Visible Impacts 116 7 Material Politics 137 8 Economy and the Archive 154 9 Conclusions 177 Notes 187 References 202 Index

Geography and social theory are increasingly recognising the critical role of material artefacts in political life. No longer can we think of materials as the passive, stable and inert foundation on which disputes emerge; rather, the unpredictable and lively behaviour of material objects and environments has become integral to the conduct of politics. In Material Politics, Andrew Barry develops this argument further, directing us towards an intriguing paradox. For just as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, the existence of materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins and impact. Political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information. Material Politics traces the emergence of disputes about an object, an oil pipeline, about which an unprecedented quantity of information was made public. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the development of the 1760km Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean was a remarkable experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility. Yet far from reducing the level of controversy surrounding the pipeline’s construction, the transparency of the project engendered a proliferation of apparently minor disputes about issues ranging from public consultation procedures and the location of beehives and walnut trees to the putative connection between the construction of the pipeline and bombsites, landslides and damage to houses. The politics of the pipeline turns out to be not just a story of oil companies, nation states and activists; it also encompasses consultants’ and engineers’ reports, archaeological sites, documentary films, steel and chemicals, cracks and corrosion, and mundane objects – trees, lorries and houses. Materials, we might say, lie at the heart of the eruption of situations that both animate and transform political life.

‘Material Politics offers something new and original to our understanding of the global oil and gas industry. Barry locates his study of pipelines at the theoretic intersection of critical science studies, forms of rule, and the materiality of resources. He brilliantly exposes the complex controversies produced by actors and agents across the industry’s value-chain, and what they say about how we think about democracy and capitalism.’ —Michael Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography, University of California, Berkeley In this strong and daring book, Andrew Barry compellingly shows that it is a daunting task to govern the materials that make up a transnational oil pipeline, that the production of information made to foster transparency and calm may fuel ever more controversies, and that materials are not in themselves political, but may well become so. —Annemarie Mol, Professor of Anthropology of the Body, University of Amsterdam.