Traces of Hope: The Affective Life of an Abandoned Railway at the Armenian Border with Turkey

This paper explores the abandoned railway between Armenia and Turkey as an infrastructural remnant where pasts, presents, and futures intersect. Its physical presence continues to inscribe a history of dis/connectivity into the landscape, while also evoking imaginations of movement, border opening, and prosperity. As a site of suspended futures, the railway is a trace of the past and simultaneously maps imaginations and hopes for the future. Once part of a broader Soviet network of connectivity, the railway today marks geopolitical deadlock and economic slowdown in Armenia. The last closed border of the former Soviet Union is guarded by Russian and Armenian forces and fenced off on the Armenian side. The border’s closure materializes the unresolved diplomatic conflict over the recognition of the Armenian Genocide and the protracted conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Turkey’s ally, over Nagorno-Karabakh. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork along the border, this paper explores how residents engage affectively with the railway. I look at the railway as a form of infrastructural poetics: it enchants and unsettles, memorializes and projects, becoming both a specter of the past and a spectacle of future potentiality. Through this lens, the paper sheds light on how abandoned infrastructures continue to shape the emotional and political life in a geopolitically tense environment.