The Belt and Road as method: Geopolitics, technopolitics and power through an infrastructure lens

Abstract

Although infrastructures may be material manifestations of state territorial power, the political effects of infrastructures are seldom straightforward. And yet, many accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) assume a relatively conventional approach to politics, and to political power. Geopolitical intentionality and top-down policy and strategic planning tend to be emphasised over project-level analyses. In response to what might be viewed as an invented BRI geopolitics, this essay suggests a more technopolitical framing of the Belt and Road and seeks to apply an infrastructural analytic to the question of how political power is realised or frustrated, enhanced or diverted, by the distributed and relational nature of infrastructure projects. It argues that our understanding of the socio-technical complexities of infrastructure is poorly served by viewing them through a conventional geopolitical lens. Instead, it seeks to lay out a research agenda and analytical framework for addressing the questions of how infrastructure projects grow and evolve, how they are embedded within the social-political-cultural contexts in which they develop and how they produce political effects that at times align with broader-scale geopolitical agendas and at other times do not.

Sovereign anxiety in Myanmar: An emotional geopolitics of China's Belt and Road Initiative

“…We contribute to these ongoing conversations by examining the emotional charge of BRI among non-elite civil society and government actors. This framing contributes to existing literature that sees the BRI as a contested and emergent infrastructure assemblage made in specific socio-spatial contexts, and which enrols a variety of state and non-state actors (Dwyer, 2020;Han & Webber, 2020;Lim, 2019;Oakes, 2021).…”

“…These studies understand the BRI as a loose assemblage of infrastructural projects, which brings actors and actants together and reconfigures power relations between them (Dean, 2020; Dwyer, 2020; Han & Webber, 2020; Murton & Lord, 2020; Oliveira et al, 2020; Sidaway et al, 2020; Szadziewski, 2020). However, even if alluded to, existing ethnographic engagements with the BRI rarely conceptualise its affects (Oakes, 2021). For instance, Lesutis (2021) shows how plans for a China‐funded railway in Kenya provoked public anxieties about neo‐colonialism, dredging up social memories of colonial infrastructural projects.…”

Locating the Belt and Road Initiative's spatial trilectics

“…The need to work across scales is hardly new. However, in light of the proliferating calls to move from analyzing the BRI as a discursive field of knowledge towards understanding it as a materially grounded field of practice (Lindberg & Biddulph, 2021; Liu, 2021; Oakes, 2021), it is worth reiterating the importance of linking place and scale, namely adopting a place‐based methodology that will remain committed to connecting multiple scales of analysis.…”

Geocultural power and the digital Silk Roads

“…A powerful bond is emerging between culture and technology that weaves together museums, archaeological research and the creative economy. Such analyses speak to Tim Oakes’ (2021) important call for moving the analysis of Belt and Road beyond conventional geopolitics, towards a more technopolitical framing. The CCP’s ongoing concern for moulding a Chinese past into a patrimoine national now has an international reach via the Silk Roads.…”