Elizabeth Sibilia
Dissertation Title: Space, Labor and Law: The global production of a landscape for
shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh and the problem of surplus
Presentation Title: Notes from chapter on the “Spaces of Shipbreaking”
A few miles north of the historic port city of Chittagong, Bangladesh, there is a sixmile stretch of beach that is home to some of the world’s most active shipbreaking yards.
For the past 30 years the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh has transformed the once
lush and densely populated mangrove coastline into a landscape scared by rust, asbestos,
and oils. In a busy year, thousands of workers, many of whom are children, labor for 150
companies operating in 80 shipbreaking yards transforming the detritus of global
capitalism (ships) into valuable material for an “emerging economy.” About 95% of the
ship is recycled in the breaking process. Steel makes up most of it. The processes
involved in extracting value from the vessels are toxic and labor intensive and place the
laborers’ lives and coastal environment at risk every step of the process. The scale of
environmental destruction and toxic work conditions makes explicit what is at stake in
this global sacrifice zone.
By the mid 1980s, Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards emerged as one of the most
competitive markets in the world for scrapping surplus tonnage. Since then, they have
competed with India and China for the number of ships scrapped while often surpassing
them in tonnage. What makes Bangladesh, its people, coastal landscape, and its history,
particular for transforming the world’s surplus into valuable material? Anthropologist
Ann Laura Stoler proposes that there needs to be new ways of disentangling that which
constitutes the tangibility of colonial pasts and imperial presents, arguing that imperial
formations persist in material debris and in ruined landscapes and through the social
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ruination of peoples lives. Thus in the context of shipbreaking the question becomes not
only what to explore, but how to explore it. What became evident through the cross
analysis of fieldwork done in 2014 in Singapore, Dubai, and Bangladesh is that, the main
stakeholders of the global demolition markets are dependent on and use spaces of the sea
as a way to dodge certain international and national environmental and labor regulations.
This research pivots offshore from Chittagong to consider what spaces, practices, and
processes are significant to disentangle in order to deepen an understanding of the
production of this toxic landscape. It locates Singapore’s outer port limits, or Singapore
OPL, as spatially critical to this production.
Recently scholars have raised a critical need to prioritize the ship as a focus of study
in itself; geographers William Hasty and Kimberly Peters suggest that studying the ship
may present geographers with opportunities to reframe key concerns within the
discipline. They propose that a geography of ships, one that positions the ship as central,
will “actively reframe existing knowledges and histories, and moreover raise new
questions and lines of enquiry because of their distinct spatiality” (2012 p. 671). Working
from this methodology, I propose that deepening our understanding of the production of
toxic spaces in Chittagong will emerge from taking seriously a “sustained focus on the
ship itself” as these scholars suggest. The ship is understood as a form of fixed, albeit
mobile capital, but in the shadow of speculative shipping markets and inevitable
depressed trade economies, the ship threatens, or risks, accumulation in its becoming
surplus or waste, and its commodity form is necessitated as it is transformed into an “endof-life vessel” by those seeking to make capture any remaining value. The shipbreaking
beaches are spaces whose topographies can be thought through topographies of risk, that
expand beyond the shores to reveal the multi-scaled nature of risk as it moves with the
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ship, in and out of territorial and non-territorial waters, as it idles in non-delineated
spaces of the sea, and ultimately comes to die in intertidal zones while producing new
forms of risk through toxic extractive practices. All the while this movement reflects the
unevenness in the production of import and export markets, transshipment hubs, trade
routes, and labor markets globally. The focus of this research is to consider how spaces of
the sea, OPL, are used strategically to facilitate the buying and selling of these ships. The
informal space of Singapore OPL, a space that exists between legal definitions, away
from shore and out of sight, becomes in a sense, a free zone or free marketplace for the
exchange of substandard vessels, a space defined by those who use it and act in it.
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