“They will not automatically benefit”: The politics of infrastructure development in Laos's Northern Economic Corridor

Political geography 1: Extractions

“…These articles provide nuanced understandings of China's massive scale BRI project and suggest an empirically rich 'scalar turn' in geopolitical and geo-economic examinations by underscoring the relational and disputed process of BRI in particular places (Oliveira et al, 2020). These studies address the use of violence against populations to preserve or extract resources and call for more methodological approaches to scale, highlighting microgeographies, microdynamics, and micosituations (Dwyer, 2020;Lawreniuk, 2020a;Lefort, 2020).…”

Navigating Sino-Thai ‘rocky’ bilateral ties: The geopolitics of riverine trade in the Greater Mekong Subregion

“…A range of political-economic forces influencing the river relate to different geopolitical eras (colonial, Cold War, post-Cold War). A series of geo-economic imaginaries surrounding broader geographical imaginaries of the Mekong basin and borderlands were developed in the late 20th century, such as the Quadrangle Economic Cooperation Zone and the Asian Development Bank's plans for the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) (Dwyer, 2020;Fau et al, 2014;Glassman, 2010;Lin and Grundy-Warr, 2012;Sims, 2015).…”

Infrastructural Connectivity and Difference

“…3 and 4), the impacts of supporting infrastructures create new, sometimes ephemeral and often uneven connections. Geographers writing on Laos cited earlier help us understand impact as relational and to strive for more critical articulations of what "cumulative" impact is in the development process (Barney, 2009;Dwyer, 2020). Dwyer asserts that projects in the Belt and Road Initiative (and most global development campaigns for that matter), whether new or drawn into that framework post-hoc, are assemblages of existing projects and relations.…”

“…In Chap. 4, we also reference Dwyer's (2020) contention that meaningful debates and reflections on the Belt and Road Initiative should not center on its similarities and differences with neoliberalism but instead on the recurring faults of regulatory protections, especially the environmental and social impact assessment (EIA or ESIA) processes promoted worldwide since the early 1990s. We also introduced the World Bank's and environmental governance state's "lexicon of impact" as described by Goldman (2005) and Dwyer (2020) in their respective writings on Laos.…”

“…4, we also reference Dwyer's (2020) contention that meaningful debates and reflections on the Belt and Road Initiative should not center on its similarities and differences with neoliberalism but instead on the recurring faults of regulatory protections, especially the environmental and social impact assessment (EIA or ESIA) processes promoted worldwide since the early 1990s. We also introduced the World Bank's and environmental governance state's "lexicon of impact" as described by Goldman (2005) and Dwyer (2020) in their respective writings on Laos. This discourse or lexicon of direct and indirect impacts (as well as induced, in-combination, or cumulative impacts) facilitates planners' agency to deploy a "nuanced specification of complexity" that, because of these planners' compromised positions in a project's power structure, ultimately tends toward reductions in overall economic risk and the concomitant externalization of the true costs of development, displacing responsibility for socioenvironmental mitigation and adaptation onto local populations (Dwyer, 2020, p. 4).…”