Roads to China and infrastructural relations in Nepal

Abstract

Across the Himalaya region, infrastructure development constitutes an array of material practices that produce space for both Nepali and Chinese state making efforts in historically roadless places. In northern Nepal, the production of large-scale transportation infrastructure has reached unprecedented levels, and Chinese interventions under the Belt and Road Initiative continue to fuel Kathmandu’s development imaginary. Examining the anticipation, articulation and implementation of road networks between northern Nepal and Chinese Tibet, I analyse the incorporation of a small development project into larger international transportation systems to argue that infrastructure is a symbolic project of national development imaginaries, a process and practice of state making, and a vector for the spatial operations of geopolitical power. Putting infrastructure studies into closer conversation with political geography, I propose infrastructural relationality as a heuristic that illuminates how trans-national road construction advances regional development objectives, visible specifically through inter-related projects, practices and processes between China and Nepal.