Whom the roads bypass: Rikoti’s East-West connections in a disconnecting Georgia

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This paper situates China’s transregional infrastructural engagement in the re/construction of the Rikoti Highway in the South Caucasus, a globally conceived, China-built and Georgia-led mega-infrastructure connectivity project. Engaging Rikoti as an emergent sociotechnical assemblage enables us to reveal the connecting infrastructural capacities from China to Europe in their written, spoken, performed and lived forms. By diluting the ‘Chineseness’ of the Belt and Road Initiative, we lay bare the global entanglements between Chinese and multilateral infrastructure schemes, material constructs, narrative and capital flows that come together along Rikoti. We thereby showcase the co-constructed and relational configurations of transregional infrastructural interventions wherein China’s shapeshifting involvement is but one modality of the global development paradigm that favours large-scale legacy projects. Our multiscalar study unearths the malleable, versatile and even elusive nature of ‘hard’ mega-infrastructures that are nevertheless neither void of geopolitical and geoeconomic ambitions nor decoupled from broader societal developments. While no one is against a better, safer Rikoti, its exclusionary enactment represents creeping authoritarianism in material form. Our insights move beyond the state of the art by rescaling agency and accountability in the rhetorical and practical making of mega-infrastructural interventions, even when they are (purposefully) rendered unlocatable.