Congestion Conversations: Efficiency and Politics in an Eastern Mediterranean Port City

Abstract

Maritime movement has been essential to the current moment of capitalism, marked by the management and optimization of supply chains. As seaports continue to scale up tremendously, however, blockages, delays, and congestion persist and even multiply, complicating popular accounts of private capital unleashing an increasingly frictionless world. This article reports from research with logistics professionals in Mersin, Turkey—host to a privatized port operated by Singaporean state-held corporation PSA since 2007. Port advocates explain the recent growth in the port's trade volume with the trope of efficiency increase under privatization. And yet, all around Mersin, talk about congestion in cargo movement will not stop. As parties disagree over whether congestion is a humanmade problem fixable by efficiency measures, or a near-inevitable reality of maritime trade beyond anyone's immediate control, congestion becomes the terrain of politics—an exercise in designating objects of public governance. Through congestion conversations, many reflect on how wealth from maritime trade should flow—which frictions stand in the way of more prosperity and a more equitable distribution. Anchoring ourselves in a port city, we may be able to observe where new fault lines of politics have opened up across the frictional sites of contemporary supply-chain capitalism.