Port Infrastructure and the Making of Historical Time: From the Arabian Gulf to the Horn of Africa MECACS Seminar Series with Guest Speaker May Darwich

As infrastructure booms across Africa, the project explores what stories are being told alongside it. Based on qualitative interviews and secondary sources, the project explores how infrastructure isn't just steel and concrete — it's a vehicle for identity-making, activating spatial imaginaries, reviving collective memory, and staging competing visions of the future. Port cities in the Horn of Africa — Djibouti-city and Berbera (Somaliland) — are imagining a different kind of future altogether: one that breaks from colonial pasts while pushing back against a Western-dominated global order. Drawing on Koselleck's theory of historical time and the idea of “elsewhere,” the project shows how port modernization projects become sites where different actors rework history and reimagine what comes next. Port operators and logistics firms borrow ready-made urban success stories — Dubai, Shekou — to brand these cities as the next global node. Political elites and residents, meanwhile, pull the same projects in a different direction, blending borrowed models with local distinctiveness to craft an identity that's recognizably their own.
May Darwich is Associate Professor in International Relations of the Middle East at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Her research attempts to bring Middle East cases to debates within IR theory with research interests including threat perception and alliance politics, identity and foreign policy, and sectarian politics in the international relations of the Middle East. Her research also focuses on cross-regional interlinks between the Middle East and Africa through the lens of port infrastructures. She is author of Threats and Alliances in the Middle East: Saudi and Syrian Policies in a Turbulent Region (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-editor of International Relations of the Middle East: Theories and Case Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2026).