Djibouti Fiddles Amid the Scramble for the Red Sea

Gateway to the Indo-Pacific, Djibouti is becoming the site of a 21st century scramble for ports, military bases, and economic models.

Today’s large-scale infrastructures that link African countries to each other and to the outside world are imbricated in colonial relations of power. Colonialism itself can be read as an infrastructure project speeding up, directing, and controlling movement to, from, and within Africa. The current infrastructure scramble that is sweeping East Africa seems to…