States of circulation: Logistics off the beaten path

Circulation in the margins

The world across, vast supply chains exist which don’t much look like the capital-intensive and high-technology logistics giants usually under study. Logistics is not only the ensemble of spatial practices and techniques associated to the “logistical regimes” of advanced supply chain capitalism (Chua et al., 2018), but equally comprises the other forms that arrangements to bridge distance assume in actual life.¹ The vast majority of people today still live in a world where container shipping is an abstract concept and where transport infrastructure is a fading memory. If Cowen defined supply chains as marked by an intensification of violence and capital, the point here would be to underscore that these concentrations can be of a minor and mundane character but nonetheless attain equal significance relative to the context. The value concentrated in livestock, for example, is negligible compared to that in a container ship or oil pipeline, but in the context of the Somali or Central African savannahs, it nonetheless fundamentally shapes the political economy along their transit routes. More importantly, studying logistical practices at the fringes of technology-intense conveyance arrangements does not entail the domain is less violent or politicized. It seems to be a universal premise that however little the value, actors everywhere seek to put things into circulation or make a profit from blocking, rerouting, or slowing them down. In the margins of supply chain capitalism, putting things into circulation involves just as many acts of violent disembedding—in which social attachments to, and other ways of exchanging, goods have to be suppressed or radically altered—as practiced in the heartland of Amazon.

While anthropology informs our understanding of the politics of circulation, foregrounding the politics of circulation at the margins does not imply we presuppose a disconnect between the machine-like all-encompassing world of a globalized logistical order and a sphere in which logistics is distinctly different. As some of the articles show, the two are rather knitted together through all kinds of fundamental connections. Marginality is relational and constituted from a hegemonic position (Hooks, 1990; Sharp, 2013; cf. Stenmanns, 2019): it is largely seen from the center that the remote hinterland, frontier or interior is savage and violent, ungoverned and disorderly, yet it is often at this relational edge of the state that its own legitimate authority is an open and contested question (Watts, 2018: 2). Despite apparent antagonisms, many interdependencies exist between centers of power and their borderlands, which are often spaces of violent accumulation appropriated in the center (Ferguson and Whitehead, 1992).

Tracing such connections between supply chain capitalism and its seeming “others” is exactly what the anthropologist Anna Tsing was after when she was getting to grips with the apparent paradox of the utterly informal, unregulated labor of mushroom picking in Oregon that nonetheless occupied a crucial place in a global supply chain of a much sought-after commodity (2015). Put differently, how can something be opposite to how we usually think of capitalism and still figure inside it at the same time? Working through that question, she reached an important realization about contemporary capitalism. Sure, there can be substantive pockets in which supply chain capitalism looks as we usually think: powerful machinations of accumulation achieved through modularized processes of conveyance, multinational corporations and modern technology. But that image, Tsing argues, is actually only a partial one. What is instead distinctive about contemporary supply chain capitalism is exactly that it also works through the very opposite of that image. She highlights how commodity chains that have all the trappings of logistical giants in one place actually hinge on logistical work in utterly deregulated and frontier-like zones elsewhere. In these spaces, there is often little to be found by way of homogeneous quantified space produced with the ambition “to maintain active control over the conditions of circulation” (Chua et al., 2018: 622).

In fact, many states of circulation thrive in contexts of infrastructural dearth, and many logistical entrepreneurs purposefully circumvent the infrastructural and administrative grids of the formalized economy as a political choice (see Hart, 2008; MacGaffey, 1991). The vast so-called global “illicit” economy—extending from informal natural resource extraction to offshore banking—hinges on illegibility but nonetheless always at one point resurfaces again as “visible” flows embedded in formal supply chains (Nordstrom, 2004; Tsing, 2009). This goes as much for minerals from the Congo which appear as elements in much sought-after mobile phones or the Somali livestock that becomes legible to the administrative systems and quality benchmarks of supply chains only for a short period late on in their travels. Distinctive about supply chain capitalism, Tsing observes instead, is that it is built up of supply chains snaking back and forth between its highly regulated component links and patches where the lead firm in such a chain amasses capital “without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced” and conveyed (Tsing, 2015: 63, emphasis added). Indeed, it is the arbitrage between such seemingly disjointed worlds, without overcoming their differences, where politics and profits reside.

This special issue takes this liminal space where supply chains lose many of their familiar trappings as its focus, exploring the unchartered territory of the politics of logistics in the zones at the margins of supply chain capitalism—mediocre ports, mountainous borderlands, and arid zones—logistical spaces where, to speak with James Scott (2009: 11), distance-demolishing technologies hold little sway. As we will see, this space is populated not only by the usual logistical workers, machines, and their bosses; zooming in on modes of conveyance at the fringes of global supply chains means charting a course through territory brimming with other forms of logistical life. Smugglers, peddlers, independent truckers, women selling cassava tubers at local markets and elephant riders turn out to be just as skilled logistical entrepreneurs as the high-paid experts of multinational transport companies and they have the same deeply engrained aspirations to overcome frictions, eliminate middlemen or strike deal with those who carry weapons, and increase profits over distance. Highlighting their operating space as abundant with meaningful logistical politics entails a “counterlogistics” not only in foregrounding alternative sites of struggle against the dominant global logistical order but also and perhaps rather opens up new geographies of circulatory politics.

In other words, the contributions to this special issue all focus on the “interstitial frontiers” (Kopytoff, 1987) of global supply chains, where they entangle with processes which exactly seem to elude the logics which characterize them elsewhere. In this issue, Neilson and Grappi (2019) allude to such entanglements when they show how uneven, unstable and contingent forms of labor, production and circulation—such as informal waste recycling along the “line of copper”—are incorporated in logistical operations through “buffer practices.” These involve cartographic technologies to model supply chains as much as other mechanisms to gain control over essentially elusive human processes. Supply chain capitalism is often equated with a retreat of, or agency beyond the, state; delving into the nuts and bolts of the Chilean copper industry, their article shows instead how neoliberalization was very much a state project—one devoted to undercutting labor struggles in order for a main export product to remain competitive under conditions of value depreciation.

Several contributions to this special issue point to a different feature of interstitial frontiers that we find in terrains with scarce advanced transport infrastructures. In such contexts, what James Scott has called the “friction of terrain” weighs down heavily on what kind of logistical figurations are at all possible (Scott, 2009: 40–50; cf. Gregory, 1987). While space and time have drastically compressed over the 20th century as a result of the global spread of “distance-demolishing technologies,” vast swaths of the globe remain “remote” and inaccessible (Kuklina and Holland, 2018: 38). Rainforests, rugged mountain areas, and soggy swamplands seem to keep at bay the kind of intensified supply chain capitalism usually under study. Just as the material features of landscapes have historically placed physical limits on the expansion of the state-form, in the relational geography of logistics, the friction of terrain seems to define the limits and margins of supply chain capitalism. Unsurprisingly, then, state and logistical supply chain capitalist ambitions collude in projects facilitating improved trade and circulation by undoing of the challenges of terrain.

This is exactly what Simon Uribe (2019) shows in his discussion of the planning and construction of a trans-Andean highway through the Amazon rainforest. In the glossy development plans, the highway and the surrounding landscape feature as unvaried, unpopulated non-places augmenting the promised transition of untamed geography to a regulated state of order. But, as Uribe masterfully dissects, the efforts to try and realize this logistical dream-world in practice get bogged down in the pre-existing legal-administrative swampland so characteristic of the edge of the state. Terrains resistant to the operations of supply chain capitalism-as-usual, as Jacob Shell has elsewhere (2015) argued, form the fertile breeding ground for “subversive mobilities” to take hold that bypass and thus challenge the “road-based state” that is at the heart of the development plans studied by Uribe. In Shell’s contribution to this special issue, he discusses one form of this kind of subversive logistics when he looks at the use of elephants in the rough Burmese borderlands where conditions are such that road-based statehood has never gained a foothold (Shell, 2019). If rebels today use elephant mobilities to elude the Burmese state, Shell points out that such forms of mobility aren’t necessarily wedded to patterns of resistance. In the past, elephants have also successfully been used for rescue operations and disaster recovery in terrain where usual relief operations cannot reach.

Schouten’s (2019) contribution focuses on the geographical margins constituted by the decay of colonial-era transport infrastructure in Central Africa. Rather than a “black hole” in the global logistical order, economic life in this logistically rough terrain is even more dependent on mundane, improvised projects of circulation. Yet contexts where livelihoods depend on putting stuff into circulation form a magnificent opportunity for forms of violent accumulation premised exactly on disrupting such projects of circulation, large or small. Exploring the mind-boggling density of roadblocks in Congo and the Central African Republic, Schouten proposes we also need to recover the older meaning of logistics as military supplies to understand this political geography of circulation. Absent the possibility to supply military outposts from base, Congolese rebels and armed forces alike are forced to live off the land, leading to a mutually reinforcing pattern of roadside militarization that makes a clear distinction between war and peace all but impossible. His case echoes Martin Van Creveld’s main point about logistics, namely, that before the transport revolution the “usual method, indeed the very aim of warfare” was to “live at the enemy’s expense” (1977: 23). Yet Schouten’s case also shows that we should not accept the friction of terrain as an objective condition. Rather, we see how people actively manipulate their surroundings to create such frictions in order to interrupt logistical processes. Rebels active in the Congo themselves dubbed this kind of logistics “nonconventional logistics,” resonating its fit with the kinds of nonconventional warfare often begotten by the strictures of rough terrain. But rather than just a subversive space, the friction of terrain also configures high-yield opportunities for daring logistical entrepreneurs. It is no mean feat to convey cattle or consumption goods over thousands of miles of rough terrain inhabited by multiple forms of highwaymen. Yet precisely these frictions mean that profits over distance can be disproportionate in the frontier-like margins. This, surely, is not unique to Central Africa, nor specific to our contemporary condition. “Distance alone,” Fernand Braudel observed about pre-19th century long-distance trade, “in an age of difficult and irregular communications, created ordinary everyday conditions for profiteering” (1982: 406).

We propose that including the margins in the study of the politics of logistics opens up a productive space where anthropology can be brought into conversation with the insights from critical geography to arrive at a picture of circulation as a politics central to ways of living—even in places where “multi-modal transport” extends across bicycles, second-hand cars, canoes, and, more often than not, porterage or animal conveyance. All contributions to this issue to a larger or lesser degree adopt the stance of looking at logistics in action to explore the politics involved. Looking at something “in action” is of course a classic anthropological approach, entailing the study of some thing in motion as a way to uncover how situated practices interact with regimes of exchange to produce specific patterns of circulation. This is exactly what Brett Neilson and Giorgio Grappi (2019) do when they follow the excavation and circulation of copper to provide a window into the politics of contemporary digital capitalism. They foreground the elemental properties of copper and the elements that constitute logistics as a political force, and how both elements entangle as a copper line which reshapes the conditions for domestic political struggles within Chile but also reconfigures international political associations between Chile and China. Starting with a thing-in-motion is also what Heidi Haugen (2019) does when she follows bundles of cheap Chinese produce from Chinese ports where Nigerian peddlers attempt to squeeze as much of it as possible into containers, to informal market stalls across Nigeria where the bundles eventually end up. As she shows in her contribution, much of the booming “informal” China-Africa trade has literally managed to squeeze itself inside the standardized format of the container shipping industry, creatively subverting the logic of legibility and standardization it promises exactly by pushing its logic of accumulation to the max. Reverse engineering the container technology, Chinese logistical workers found out the container can withstand not only the standardized goods but, helped by rudimentary compression machines, also the pressure of many bundles of clothing that small African traders will decompress and convey onward in small parcels to their informal shops or their kin back in the village. This is a case, then, where friction and pressure literally are productive of unconventional forms of logistical life that mushroom on the trunks of supply chain capitalism as usual. It can only thrive because rather than aiming to control stuff in motion even more, contemporary supply chains instead operate according to a principle of minimal governmentality, with matters of control and legibility only exercised at certain moments in the life of a commodity, relinquishing the ambition to achieve total transparency and authority over conveyance. As an infrastructure of globalization, then, the container also allows creative adaptation, bringing people together in new and surprising ways (cf. Harvey and Knox, 2015: 75). Haugen’s paper confirms once again that up close, the production of circulation is less seamless and frictionless than often portrayed (Gregson et al., 2017); taking an up-close approach, it becomes possible to re-humanize logistics as an ecosystem mired in inefficiencies, contradictions, and glitches, one that is shot through with human aspirations we can sympathize with.

In their article, Stepputat F and Hagmann T (2019) follow goats and sheep as they travel from the Somali pastoral areas in the Horn of Africa to the port of Berbera in Somaliland, only to be transited onwards to Saudi Arabia. Here, “just-in-time delivery” means getting to the port before the Hajj, the season of pilgrimage, when prices for livestock skyrocket. The conveyance of livestock across geographical, and ecological boundaries requires physical infrastructure, such as ports and shipping; but more importantly, their case study shows, Somali livestock trade has historically depended on a social infrastructure of personal relations, clan-alliances, and common norms that together ensure protection, agreed upon modes of exchange, and access to water and pasture across vast and rough terrains. Considering, as the papers of Schouten (2019) and Stepputat and Hagmann (2019) do, contemporary logistical modalities in marginal spaces as part of a longer process of the formation of states of circulation at once challenges us to acknowledge historical continuities and allows us to identify what is distinct in contemporary rearrangements. Rather than new projects of circulation, Somali and Central African livestock has for ages transacted across vast distances, along the way profoundly shaping regional political economies. Thus, in many of the contributions to this issue, it is difficult to uphold a clear-cut image of logistics as only oppressive or exploitative. In contexts where conveyance of relatively modest quantities of consumable goods across daunting social and material terrain might mean the difference between life or death, or where bundles of cloth shipped across the oceans allow Nigerians to improve their quality of life, an a priori critical positionality towards such more or less regularized supply chains becomes unsettled to say the least.

The co-production of logistics and political (dis-)orders

As we have dropped the a priori assumption on how logistics shapes political orders in favor of following actors as they try to make things circulate, we here propose that it can be fruitful to approach the politics of logistics through their co-production. This section elaborates on this notion before it takes us back to the roles that long-distance trade has played in processes of state formation and finally to contemporary examples of the co-production of logistics and political orders. But first a word about “co-production.” When scholar of Science and Technology Studies (STS) Sheila Jasanoff coined the term in her book States of Knowledge, she pushed for a paradigm shift in how we understand individual political situations when we take as our starting point that “science and technology permeate the culture and politics of modernity” (2004: 1). Essentially, the term co-production is a thinking tool that forces us to dissolve analytical dichotomies, destabilizes lines of influence and to call assumptions about relational pathways into question.

Instead of the co-production between science and politics, however, States of Circulation is interested in the co-production of logistics and political order. We forward the idiom of co-production to render explicit the dual assumption that (1) making things circulate always requires forceful intervention, and (2) that political orders are always also logistical achievements. The first premise entails, as already touched upon before, that circulation is always already embedded in socio-political relations and reminds us that it requires political work—not excluding coercion—to dis-embed flows from these earlier relations and re-embed them in new arrangements and circulatory regimes (cf. Appadurai, 1986). The second, by contrast, draws attention to the obverse: that the meaningful projection of political power in whatever form—monopolies of force, administrative rule, governmentalities—is always also an affair of “action at a distance,” a logistical problem, which needs to be recognized as essential to the constitution and contestation of political orders.

These entanglements, to be sure, far antedate the invention of logistics as a modern, Western art and discipline. Far from being a natural phenomenon, the configuration of distinct forms of circulation has always been the outcome of careful political engineering; in the most obvious sense, it seems a constant throughout history that elites consistently attempted to restrict participation in long-distance trade. Its “élite objects of circulation” conferred status because they are not abundant locally and therefore not subject to regimes of reciprocal exchange. They were rather subject to political and military regimes that aimed to confine their circulation to closed circuits (Dalton, 1975: 98). As Arjun Appadurai formulated it, “though commodities, by virtue of their exchange destinies and mutual commensurability, tend to dissolve the links between persons and things, such a tendency is always balanced by a countertendency, in all societies, to restrict, control, and channel exchange” (1986: 24).

In this issue, Schouten’s contribution most explicitly takes up the general historical principle of co-production between shaping circulation and political orders. Before colonial rule subsumed trade to an “architecture of circulation,” he shows, African communities creatively forged polities out of the capacity to disrupt evolving long-distance trade routes. His case illustrates a broader, tenacious principle around which archeological and anthropological scholars converge: rulers’ control over long-distance trade gave them power, yet the very same objects, when circulating outside of rulers’ control, could, conversely, constitute a threat to their power; power was constructed around participation in, and the power to disrupt, the circulation of things across long distances (Terray, 1974; Vansina, 1962: 388). Whether it was kula, ivory, spices, slaves, silk, iron, coal, cowries or other commodities—engineering the special place of long-distance trade made or broke all sorts of polities. Focusing on Africa, Quirk and Vigneswaran go to great length to underscore how mobility shaped African state-formation and its ongoing transformation, and how, vice versa, African states have always been centrally preoccupied with governing mobility (2015; cf. Lombard, 2016). In the centuries preceding the twentieth, writes social theorist Joshua Clover in this connection, much of meaningful everyday politics thence took the shape of what he called “circulation struggles,” which he defines as “struggles to control space and movement through it” (2016: 138).

Such observations suggest that, when approaching supply chain capitalism, we should pay attention to the deeper historical connections between exchange over long distances and its attendant forms of power. If logistics emerged as a concept, art and discipline in the late 19th century but has firm roots in earlier colonial soil (Chua et al., 2018: 620), substantivist anthropologists insist that the political importance of supply chains has an even deeper history. Max Weber, for all his faults, was after the same when he observed that “Commerce by sea is everywhere originally conjoined with piracy; the warship, pirate ship, and merchant ship are to begin with not distinguished from each other” (Weber, 2003 [1927]: 202). If we widen the historical lens, it turns out long-distance trade, as supply chains were usually referred to, is as old as humanity itself and has everywhere been crucial to the constitution and transformation of political orders, determining not only their location along the junction of trade routes, at mountain passes, ports, or rivers, but also forming a key source of power, income and conflict (e.g. Appadurai, 1986; Makki, 2011; Polanyi, 1944: 63ff). Carefully tracing these movements, much of Fernand Braudel’s seminal trilogy The Wheels of Commerce is concerned with etching out the slow fermentation of a global political economy premised on the high rate of concentration of value in the “sphere of circulation” rather than, as much conventional political economy at the time would have it, production. As he put it,

Until the nineteenth century, when capital moved into industrial production, now newly-promoted to the rank of large profit-maker, it was in the sphere of circulation, trade and marketing that capitalism was most at home; and even if it sometimes made more than fleeting incursions on to other territory; and even if it was not concerned with the whole of circulation, since it only controlled, or sought to control, certain channels of trade. (1982: 231–232)

These observations resonate all the more clearly across postcolonial settings, where the sweeping transformations of deregulation and privatization have given rise to the coexistence of sophisticated supply chains in some places with the ruinations of never really achieved colonial projects in others. In this regard, we are also in conversation with a burgeoning literature that has sited its engagement with the politics of logistics and transport infrastructure in the global south, ranging from port and corridor projects to dams and trucking (Carse, 2014; Enns, 2018; Harvey and Knox, 2015; Hönke and Cuesta-Fernandez, 2018; Nugent, 2018). Many of these places have never escaped from—or, depending on the perspective, have creatively reinvented—the political-economic model of the “gatekeeper state” (Cooper, 2002) that colonial projects imprinted on them. A substantial number of postcolonial states still derive the bulk of their earnings from taxation on trade at the domestic/international interface. Updating this argument for our era of supply chain capitalism, Jatin Dua (2018) called the contemporary incarnation of this form of authority derived from governing nodes of circulation “chokepoint sovereignty.”

If one of the central dynamics in states of circulation is driven by contentious relations between different projects of circulation through “dynamic processes of negotiation, maneuvers, resistance, arm-twisting, and power differentials” (Stepputat and Hagmann, 2019: 797), then engaging with the politics of logistics also calls for a reappraisal of the categories that structure our understanding of order. Several authors in the special issue discuss how logistical efforts hinge upon, reinforce or disrupt existing institutions and governance arrangements that are supposed to express sovereignty, stability and legitimacy, and hence political order.

Stenmanns (2019) identifies those tangles in his ethnography of the efforts to turn the port of Freetown in Sierra Leone into another gateway for global logistics. Yet to underscore the continuities of hegemonic logistical projects, Stenmanns cautions, perhaps risks overlooking the exciting other forms of politics that thrive in the margins. “This is now where Europe begins,” the terminal manager said in an interview with Stenmanns as he pointed to the new, updated, container terminal; but the port, Stenmanns shows, brims with logistical life that doesn’t fit “European” Freetown. Whereas logistics might be understood as a distinctively homogenizing project, Stenmanns’ contribution shows that the aspiration to achieve clean logistical space might not always achieve the “thinning out” of place in space (Sack, 1986: 89) usually associated with it. At times quite to the contrary, as Stepputat and Hagmann (2019) show in their contribution. During the 1990s, elites, clan-elders, businesspeople, and politicians in Somaliland collated their efforts to protect trade against multiple and random taxation by militia and highwaymen. In what is possibly the clearest-cut example of the co-production of logistical and political order, by doing so, they forged Somaliland as a de facto state with centralized taxation and provision of security to logistical operators. This new political order ambiguously hinged on the re-opening of circulation along the “Berbera corridor” in the Northern Somali territories, beyond Mogadishu’s control. In the late 2010s, Somaliland elites have pursued international recognition—“the economic way”—by means of upgrading the Berbera port and corridor through contracts and transit agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopian authorities and firms. Pursuing formal “chokepoint sovereignty” by linking the Berbera corridor into global logistical networks in this way, however, risks undercutting some of the fragile accommodations and alliances that made possible Somaliland’s birth as a logistical state in the 1990s in the first place.

How underdetermined the situated politics of logistics are by their analytical similarities as nodes of chokepoint sovereignty becomes evident when we move from the port city of Berbera to that of Takoradi at the other end of the African continent. In her contribution, Brenda Chalfin (2019) explores logistics as the co-production between off-shore oil economies and on-shore urban transformation in Ghana through the notion of “terraqueous urbanism.” Through this logistics-centered looking glass, Chalfin is able to gauge the convoluted political and infrastructural transformations of ruinous postcolonial areas as they are repurposed at the edge of a new extractive frontier. She challenges the typical portrayal of extractive logistical hubs as essentially enclaved and cut off from the surrounding social and material landscape, instead identifying the many “mosaic configurations” of on-shore urban spaces (such as maritime business complexes, training facilities, ports and airports) emerging from linkages to the extractive oil complex off the Ghanaian shore. To wits, logistical operators, rather than avoiding the state’s regulatory authority, rely on its “political armatures,” such as the aura of sovereignty and the cooperation with Ghanaian armed forces for protection. These in turn become reinvigorated by the cooperation and the upgrading of ailing infrastructures and technology.

Such mutually reinforcing patterns of co-production between formal logistical orders and sovereign statehood stand in marked contrast to the contributions which highlight how constellations of rough terrain, informal traders, highwaymen and armed groups constitute equally stable and patterned logistico-political orders that by their very existence defy their formal and state-endorsed opposites. Whereas supply chain capitalists and their state sponsors will sanction such forms as “subversive,” it is to be remembered that they at once form the typical way through which supply chains come to life the world across, and that informal logistical labor in one place is so often the human infrastructure out of which corporate profits elsewhere are wrought—with global supply chains as the machinery to produce this perverse combination of profit concentration and the maintenance of precariousness (cf. Meagher, forthcoming).

However, there are more insidious forms of co-production between logistics and dis-orders. Both Stenmanns’ and Haugen’s contributions point out such subtler forms of disordering. Stenmanns argues that the misrecognition of Freetown Port’s significance in the local political economy impedes an effective implementation of global security standards, while attempts to engineer compliance end up tolerating and leaving “disorderly” practices in place. Haugen’s case of how logistical operators compress the content of containers and hence thwart standardized systems of measurement and valorization, provides another example of persisting “disorder,” of lenient inspection practices and tolerance for disorder in some (Chinese) ports.

Finally, Simon Uribe (2019) analyzes ethnographically a section of the huge collection of infrastructure projects envisioned to create seamless circulation, economic integration, increased state presence and even “civilization” across the Amazonian borderlands. He zooms in on the problems associated with land tenure illegibility that have brought sections of the project to a complete halt due to conflicts over expropriation and compensation of land for the new roads and bridges. In his masterful attenuation of the domineering reading of state-making projects that Scott presents us with (1998), Uribe’s case shows that state power projection has feet of clay. The conundrums the road project runs into are exactly effects of state practices to make space and population legible, and not primarily a product of society’s resistance vis a vis the state, or of any “non-state” forms of illegibility. Thus, in this case, what is co-produced by the aspiration and efforts to enable and speed-up circulation is “an array of normative, social and political (dis)orders” that threaten the whole project.