From imperial canals to twenty-first-century smart ports, the struggle for power has often been fought with concrete, steel, and contracts rather than with open conflict. "Bids and Bullets" argues that the real drama of contemporary geopolitics unfolds in loan agreements, tender documents, and feasibility studies. Through a lens of infrastructure politics, the book shows how megaprojects decide whether regimes are strengthened or weakened, and whether states emerge more autonomous or more exposed to external leverage.
Ranging across ports, railways, energy assets, and digital backbones, Aisha Benhadi maps the politics of financing, building, and operating strategic facilities. She examines how debt diplomacy works in practice, how patronage and tender politics shape who wins contracts, and how technical choices made by engineers and consultants can lock countries into long-term dependence. At the same time, she foregrounds local agency, tracing how governors, activists, and everyday users accept, resist, or quietly reshape large projects imposed in the name of development. Historical vignettes sit alongside comparative case studies, revealing recurring patterns of promise, capture, and contestation.
Written for students, policy analysts, journalists, and engaged citizens, the book offers a clear framework for assessing sovereign risk and identifying when seemingly benign infrastructure becomes a lever of influence. Readers learn how to interpret financing structures, legal clauses, and control over strategic assets as indicators of shifting power relations. By the end, "Bids and Bullets" equips its audience not with ready-made answers, but with sharper questions for reading every new corridor, dam, or data centre announcement as a political act with consequences far beyond the construction site.
Aisha Benhadi writes about the entanglement of infrastructure, power, and global order. As the author of "Bids and Bullets", she approaches ports, railways, energy systems, and digital backbones not as engineering feats alone, but as political choices that bind states to particular futures. Her work is animated by close attention to how decisions taken in distant boardrooms and ministries reappear in the lives of communities, workers, and officials on the ground.Across her research and writing, Benhadi draws on debates in international political economy, development studies, and sociology, while remaining attentive to the material realities of budgets, construction sites, and legal texts. She is particularly interested in port cities and border regions, where global ambitions and local histories collide most visibly. In this book, she combines historical reflection with contemporary observation to illuminate how contracts, financing structures, and tender processes create new hierarchies and vulnerabilities.Benhadi aims to bridge scholarly analysis and public understanding, writing for readers who want more than slogans about connectivity or alarmist claims about hidden empires. Her work invites careful, empirically grounded questioning of who benefits, who decides, and who bears the risks when megaprojects are planned and built.
