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This essay introduces the Symposium on the spatial politics of infrastructure‐led development in Pakistan. It situates the Symposium (and the research site of Pakistan) with respect to the geographical literature on infrastructural politics more broadly, and the Belt and Road Initiative specifically. The essay also previews the seven contributing articles of the Symposium through a discussion of three cross‐cutting themes: securing the periphery, technologies of urban governance, and contested environments. The essay concludes by calling for the interrogation of infrastructural politics in specific regions as sites within a larger global conjunctural analytical framework.

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Pakistan is one of the most militarised and unevenly developed political economies in the post‐colonial world. Already acute extractive logics in long‐suffering ethnic peripheries have intensified alongside state repression after the regime of the so‐called “war on terror” was initiated in 2001. In this paper, I contrast the brutalising effects of securitised infrastructure, or what I call the “checkpost state”, with the “politics of the universal” espoused by various popular movements across uneven historical‐geographical terrain. On the basis of personal experience as a political organiser, I highlight difficulties and modest successes in cultivating what Frantz Fanon termed “universalising values” in the building of an emancipatory politics bridging centres and peripheries. I argue that the challenge posed by Fanon during the heyday of revolutionary internationalism is today even more urgent as hitherto spatially insulated peripheries stretch into metropolitan settings.