No abstract

By way of introduction to the four papers that follow, we chart some key parameters of debate about finance and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In particular, we argue that the rise of discourses about "predatory lending" and "debt trap" (that feature in much commentary and reportage about BRI) merits critique and contextualization. The financing needs of BRI also raises important implications for the geography of financial markets and business services in Asia and other key locations in global financial networks. The networked nature of financial centres and the vital role of advanced business services brings into view actors, sites and spaces (such as law firms and offshore centres) that have been neglected by the geopolitical lenses most often applied to analysing BRI.

COVID-19 has become a global public health pandemic which requires scientific, technical, public policy and health system responses at multi-scales. COVID-19 is also a pandemic that is impacting socio-economic and political systems in profound ways. This paper briefly outlines why and how pandemics may expose uneven socio-economic geographies of vulnerability and risk, and also be thought of in relation to environmental and non-human challenges to our geopolitical map of territorial nation-states and sovereignties. In relation to Southeast Asia we argue that preexisting and ongoing political-economy linkages are shaping key responses to COVID-19. In particular, we consider the geopolitical and geoeconomic reasoning of Cambodia and Myanmar, and their relations with China. We reflect on the factors that shape their national responses in response to the pandemic, characterized by certain silences and erasures to their local geographies.

As frame for the set that follows, this article first considers the range of theoretical interpretations of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Our focus, however, is on a related yet distinct set of questions. Rather than theorising BRI per se, we approach BRI as a source of theoretical implications and reflectionasking what it signals and implies for wider cultural, economic, political, social and urban theories, and for histories of and afterlives of imperial geopolitics.

This paper focuses on the 'the unseen transboundary commons' of residues, nutrients and mobile matter associated with the annual flood pulse that support Cambodia's inland fisheries. We develop the idea of biophysical geopolitics concentrating on political-socio-natures rather than the purely biophysical. In the context of multiple mega-projects in the Basin, we argue the flood pulse has become increasingly compromised, which is an urgent socio-ecological security issue facing the Mekong region. Scores of livelihoods are dependent on the hydrological flood pulse via the reproduction of the inland fisheries, and a diversity of wetlands resources. Our paper builds on cross-comparative research focusing on a geo-strategic mouth of the Tonle Sap (Chhnok Tru) and a transborder area along the Mekong main-stream (Stung Treng, Cambodia -Champasak, Laos area). By viewing biophysical matter as becoming trans-border geopolitical matter, we wish to emphasise the critical socio-ecological character of the hydrological flood pulse, and the urgency of cumulative spatial and temporal changes affecting diverse wetlands communities. Loss of wild capture fisheries and the more unpredictable flows of the Mekong are signs of an emergent and dangerous era of increasing environmental insecurity.