How can infrastructure be criminal? How does a mine, a gas field, a suburban neighbourhood or a dam become a perpetrator of violence and insecurity? Surviving Society Presents: Material Crimes answers these questions. Each episode investigates a different piece of infrastructure, tracing its global, colonial connections across time and space. The series shows us how the physical sites of everyday life are linked to networks of private and public actors who profit from violence inflicted on spaces and communities on the margins. The series also shines a spotlight on the people-powered movements exposing and challenging the many crimes of infrastructure.

In 2005 blowouts occurred at Bangladesh’s Tengratila gas field operated by Canada’s Niko Resources Ltd. Toxins leached into the surrounding environment, devastating local habitats. Niko pled guilty to bribery charges related to Tengratila in 2011, but it had already sued Bangladesh’s government for losses at an international arbitration tribunal. What the hell is international corporate arbitration? The opaque legal wranglings of this case reveal the invisible infrastructure of international investment law, its colonial inheritances, and how companies shirk criminal liability for corporate negligence and corruption. Paul Gilbert, Senior Lecturer in International Development at the University of Sussex, is this episode’s host, speaking to leading Global South arbitrator and academic Muthucumuraswamy Sornarajah, legal scholar Gus van Harten and Catherine Coumans from Mining Watch Canada.

Material Crimes is what happens when “true crime” meets academic research. Like a detective, each episode’s narrator follows the trail of a different infrastructural crime, grounded in a specific site, with its own particular history. But whether the focus is a dam, a trainline or a mine, in the suburbs of South Africa or a military base in Kenya, the people featured across these episodes tie them to global histories of conquest, resource extraction, and profit-making. As a whole, the series takes a deep dive into the material crimes that shape the lives of colonised, racialised and marginalised communities everywhere, as well as how they are mobilising for different, liberated futures. 

Listen to the latest episode.