Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline

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.

• Presents an original theoretical approach to political geography by revealing the paradoxical relationship between materials and politics
• Explores how political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information about their performance, origins, and impact
• Studies the example of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline – a fascinating experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility – and its wide-spread negative political impact
• Capitalizes on the growing interdisciplinary interest, especially within geography and social theory, about the critical role of material artifacts in political life

Keywords: Political Geography, Geography, social theory, oil pipeline, Soviet Union, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Caspian Sea, Mediterranean, bombsites, landslides, oil companies, nation states, political activists, engineering, archaeological sites, documentary films, steel, chemicals, corrosion