Post-Soviet Energy Geopolitics-Infrastructure-Expertise. A Pipeline Biography
A Pipeline Biography is an ethnographic book project, exploring post-Soviet energy geopolitics, infrastructure diplomacy, and new forms of expertise related to the fossil fuels sector across Europe/Eurasia. Taking as its ethnographic focus the Southern Gas Corridor—a cross-border gas pipeline that was built to move Caspian Basin hydrocarbons to Europe—the book follows mid-career, elite-expert actors within energy geopolitics from government administrations, multinational energy companies and others, and their everyday work around various cross-border hard and soft fossil fuel infrastructures (gas markets, physical pipelines, and regulation) as they influence political decisions and governmental and company policies to govern energy and climate (in)securities of Europeans. The book argues that culture plays a far more significant role in energy diplomacy and cross-border infrastructure development than is commonly acknowledged.
Bilge Firat is a political anthropologist, published ethnographer and storyteller, and the author of Diplomacy and Lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: The Private Life of Politics in Brussels (Manchester UP’19). Broadly, Bilge is interested in questions of access and accountability through the corridors of power, from high politics to energy and infrastructure. Collecting and re-telling real-life stories help her tell geopolitical and geoeconomic tales as everyday phenomena. Her next book project explores the post-Soviet development of energy geopolitics, infrastructure, and expertise connecting Europe and Eurasia. Focusing on the interplay between infrastructural geopolitics and geopolitical infrastructures, Bilge is currently writing an ethnographic account of the makings of markets, infrastructure, and expertise in the Southern Gas Corridor, a cross-border socio-material assemblage of several long-range pipelines, operating between Europe and the Caspian Basin since 2021.
»Geopolitics, Infrastructure and Scale-Making in the Southern Gas Corridor«, in: Ethnos 90(2), 2025, pp. 265–286.
»Geopolitics as an Ethnographic Object and Agenda«, in: Geography Compass 16/7: e12649, 2022.
Diplomacy and Lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: The Private Life of Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2022.
»Integrative Currents? Electrifying the Turkey-EU Relations in Times of Blackout«, in: Anna Szolucha (ed.), Energy, Resource Extraction and Society: Impacts and Contested Futures, New York: Routledge 2018.
»›The Most Eastern of the West, the Most Western of the East‹: Energy-Transport Infrastructures and Regional Politics of the Periphery in Turkey«, in: Economic Anthropology 3/1, 2016, pp. 81–93.
After being initially proposed to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to Austria through Turkey in 1998, the Nabucco pipeline project was ultimately abandoned in 2013.