Description
China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted considerable attention owing to its unprecedented scale and the potential ramifications for regional and global orders, economic and political alike. President Xi Jinping’s geo-economic vision proposes to integrate the Eurasian landmass via a network of rail and road links (the Silk Road Economic Belt) and sea lanes of communications (the Maritime Silk Road). The initiative has the potential to profoundly transform how states, markets and regions interact and, possibly, integrate. This paper complements the hitherto prevailing China-centred analysis (with its focus on the domestic political and economic drivers of the project and its global ramifications) with a bottom-up perspective, zooming in on the micro-politics of this global project. Drawing on field research in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in 2018 the project brings local actors, movements, discourses and narratives to the centre-stage of analysis in a multi-scalar analysis of politics. The paper’s novelty is thus two-fold. Empirically, the focus of the project offers a series of in-depth case studies of countries on the receiving end of China’s infrastructural attention. Theoretically, it extends recent developments in the state transformation literature within international relations by incorporating insights from social movements studies and environmental studies. Specifically, framing and frame analysis provide conceptual tools that are especially well-suited to study multi-scalar political processes, as well as discourses, narratives and counter-narratives by local actors. In essence, the paper intends to tell the story of the Belt and Road Initiative from the ‘peripheries’ and is part of a larger research agenda on growing inter-Asian connectedness and the remaking of regional and world orders in the early 21st century.Period | 10 Sept 2018 |
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Held at | Lingnan University, Hong Kong |
Degree of Recognition | National |
Keywords
- China
- Central Asia
- Belt and Road Initiative
- inter-Asian connectedness
- energy
- Sinophobia
- state transformation