Infrastructure Redux

Pakistan's economy is currently semi-industrialized, but it has the high potential for prosperity in the 21st century. The focus of this book is on industrial infrastructures of production and circulation, from power distribution and roads to dry ports and airports. It looks at how these infrastructures underpin visions of progress and mediate relations between the state and capitalist firms in export-oriented industrial and industrializing districts in Punjab, Pakistan. Infrastructure Redux explores infrastructure's affect in two ways: (1) by examining the impact of poor infrastructure on different sized firms in diverse export-oriented industries, and (2) by analyzing the conditions through which the workings of infrastructure, its disruptions and facilitations, bring to the fore struggles to reshape modern industrial life in contemporary Pakistan. The author argues that in the present conjuncture of an infrastructure crisis the apparent absence of the state in the planning and provision of industrial infrastructure is somewhat deceptive. Although the state is not absent, its presence is re-configured through a variety of firm-led infrastructural initiatives. Furthermore, the strategies of capitalist firms operate within a moral economy in which a pervasive narrative of national moral decline and uncertainty explains the disintegration of a specific type of public infrastructure: electricity. This study will appeal to students, scholars and researchers interested in industrialization and globalization.