Unpacking Logistics: Space, Governance, and Future of the 'outside'

Logistics is not only an industrial sector or an economic technology that creates seamless interconnectivity (Stenmanns, 2019), indeed is a key branch of contemporary capitalism that defines infrastructural spaces, communication flows, and workers' bodies as a profit strategy in different markets (Chua et al., 2018; Cowen, 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Tsing, 2009, 2016). Critical geographers, in particular, position the field of logistics as an often unexamined backdrop of the ongoing 'neoliberalisation of space' (Cowen, 2010), which spatially fixes 'capitalism's chronic problem of overaccumulation' (Danyluk, 2018: 631). However, we can consider logistics space with a broader interpretation, as ' the rest in a multipolar world' (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2024), the 'constitutive outside' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), and on this backdrop, in the field of logistics, the notion of margin, circulation, and spatial stand-by mobilise a set of possible new research links. Following Tsing (1994: 279), the margins are not ‘a geographical, descriptive location’. Transcalar margins, storage warehouses, data centres, and logistics infrastructures represent vantage points ‘from which we see the instability of social categories’ (Tsing, 1994: 279). Following Sharp's (2013) analysis of ‘geopolitics at the margins’, such margins are thus not the empty spaces between the major territory of a global logistics narrative. In an Italian National Research Project framework, the paper reflects on the spatiality of logistics territories, actors and powers, focusing on the nexus circulation/storage and margins/centres and exploring some Italian and French cases.