Geopolitical encounters and entanglements along the belt and road initiative

Abstract

AbstractThis survey brings into conversation diverse literatures on geopolitics in order to interrogate one of the most visible geopolitical projects of our age, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The paper provides a brief review of the main geopolitical approaches that are being applied to the BRI, including classical, critical, radical, assemblage and feminist perspectives. While feminist and assemblage approaches to the BRI are positioned as a way out of essentialised accounts of this initiative, this review also attempts to facilitate a dialogue on the value of applying multiple approaches and different types of knowledge to the BRI and its various contexts. It seeks to capture how such thinking in geopolitics can bring the BRI's incoherence and myriad tensions into focus. This involves tracing the competing logics, contexts, relations and elements from which the BRI has emerged. Bringing competing strands of geopolitical thought into conversation rejects singular and reductionist interpretations of the BRI and understandings of geopolitics more broadly. It highlights linkages between elements and assemblages, as well as a circular logic in some of the prevailing approaches to the BRI and geopolitics. This survey explores the multi‐dimensional possibilities of contemporary geopolitics for examining the BRI's interwoven logics and its contradictions, while using the case study of the BRI to evaluate the diversity and potential of this sub‐field.