The Infrastructured State: Territoriality and the National Infrastructure System

At the core of the logic of the book is that states engage in infrastructuring as a means of securing and enhancing their territoriality. The link between these concepts – in previous works – was explored via the framework of the infrastructural mandate and this will be a key issue within this work as well. In positioning, infrastructure as a system there is a presumption that all infrastructures exhibit some degree of mutual dependence. As such, an NIS is not simply about conventional conceptions of infrastructure based on those that support economic activity (i.e. energy, transport and information) but also about broader hard and soft structures that both enable and are supported by the aforementioned economic infrastructures. Consequently, this book offers an ambitious holistic view on the form of NIS arguing that the infrastructural mandate requires a conception of the state that encapsulates themes from both the competition and the welfare states in infrastructure provision.