"What is the relation between the unity and stability of the nation-state and the state of a nation's infrastructure? In addressing this question, Roads forces us to consider, among much else, the expertise of infrastructure's architects, the construction engineers, whose work is attuned to the instability, unruliness and unevenness of the environments within which infrastructure is assembled. The infrastructure of the road turns out not to be the stable base on which the state can ground its existence, but a situated achievement. Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox’s remarkable ethnography of infrastructure is a vital intervention, in anthropology and beyond."