My current book project, Assembling Regional Community: Infrastructural Triumphalism and Techno-Utopian Geographies of Southern Africa, is based on one year of fieldwork at the Kazungula Bridge One Stop Border Post – a regional connectivity node where the borders of four countries (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) meet. From this node I observed the everyday business of managing regional circulations along the largest trade corridor in southern Africa and conducted interviews with with government officials, customs officers, brokers, cross-border truck drivers, border communities, as well as technical and development experts. Additional data includes a technical assistance archive, planning documents, global and regional frameworks for development, and participant observation of a regional connectivity technical assistance program. Assembling Regional Community examines how regional connectivity emerges from the vantage point of Kazungula OSBP as a problem space out of which the region itself emerges as a technology for overcoming the political and economic incapacity of the postcolonial state in southern Africa between 1980 and 2063. It is an ethnography of a regional community under infrastructural assembly.
Venolia Rabodiba 