ABSTRACT
In the years following the 2009 coup d’état, the government of Honduras partnered with transnational investors and libertarian advisers to promote and pursue an ambitious new project, the creation of an autonomous, free-market jurisdiction and new ultra-modern city. Projected as the future Dubai, Hong Kong, or Singapore of Central America, the Zone for Economic Development and Employment, or ZEDE, calls for the simultaneous production of a new urban space and the creation of a new, autonomous institution-territorial framework of governance. This paper seeks to examine this process of “development” through a focus on the micro-political moments in which relations of domination are established and re-asserted and an attentiveness to how these moments form part of broader territorializing and colonizing assemblages. Such a perspective seeks to offer a critical approach to studying the mutually entangled processes of “new cities” development and the emergence of new institutional-territorial assemblages that challenge established conceptions of sovereignty and territory.