The Belt and Road Initiative as Multiple Geographies of Knowledge Production

Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted wide scholarly attention. However, discussions among social scientists on BRI have largely premised on the academic infrastructure in English language contexts. Academic research on BRI in China has often been only briefly mentioned as background information in English language publications. This disjuncture between scholarship on BRI inside and outside China reflects the multiple geographies of BRI. Thinking through BRI in English and Chinese scholarship, this paper considers how existing and future factors such as funding sources, language politics, political framing of the research and institutional surveillance may yield different intellectual spaces for understanding the knowledge production of BRI.

Geocultural power and the digital Silk Roads

“…The Chinese government has invested heavily in framing Belt and Road as a ‘dialogue of civilisations’, proclaiming that all civilisations are equal and deserve ‘mutual respect’ (Winter, 2022a). But as Yang (2021) notes, as these discourses become structured around particular forms of scholarly research and cultural policy, distinct asymmetries can be observed. In this case I would emphasise the multiple imbalances across the contemporary political landscape, the histories being studied, and across the technologies being used to record and interpret them.…”