Power disruptions: power system reconfigurations reassembling the state

Rather than unitary actors or fixed realities, states are porous, heterogenous and unstable phenomena in becoming, whose authority and cohesive appearance rely on the laborious coordination of material elements in both their structuring and discursive capacities. Post-structuralist state theories have shown how mundane everyday practices contribute to the production of stateness, while scholars from diverse disciplinary origins have detailed the ways in which infrastructure politics contributes to the formation of state-society boundaries across scales. This chapter focuses on changing infrastructural systems, and particularly on power systems reconfigurations through distributed generation renewable systems (DGRS) to map how these simultaneously stabilise and de-stabilise the assemblage of the state through lines of de/re-territorialisation and de/coding. It puts in conversation scholarships on decentralised energy transitions and their potential for ‘energy democracy’ with emergent engagements with the concept of ‘proximity’ to unearth how DGRS become powerful agents in the reproduction of the state and of desired and desirable energy transitions.