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(Re)constructing State Power and Livelihoods through the Laos-China Railway Project
Abstract
This paper examines the governance and implementation of land compensation for the Laos-China Railway (LCR). It brings to light the central government’s strategy to use compensation rules and procedures as its means to extend its spatial power across the provinces, districts, and villages that are affected by the railway construction. We examine both the manifestations and effects of state power through the formulation and implementation of land compensation procedures. Taking Naxang village in Chomphet district, Luang Prabang province, in Laos as a case, the paper highlights: 1) how centralized compensation rules and procedures serve as a means for the central government to expand its power; 2) how power relations between central-provincial-district governments (re)shaped the actual project implementation especially pertaining to compensation valuation and payment; and 3) implications for smallholder livelihood options and strategies.
... These and many other contributions have been highly influential in calling attention to the politics embedded in and enacted through infrastructure (see for example Pinch, 1992;Winner, 1980) and the various ways in which territorial relations are reconfigured through infrastructure. Beyond changes in the biophysical environment, some studies have focused on how state-society relations change as an effect of infrastructure construction and how infrastructures always (re) distribute societal benefits and burdens (see for example Akhter, 2015;Meehan, 2014;Menga, 2015;Suhardiman et al., 2021). Others have demonstrated how societal norms and modes of organizing are reshaped by infrastructure, acting on people's everyday lives and (self)consciousness in often invisible yet powerful ways (Shlomo, 2017). ...
Infrastructures and their roles and connections to and in territories and territorialization processes have increasingly become objects of study in political geography scholarship. In this contribution, we build on these emerging insights and advance them by further conceptually disentangling the agential role of infrastructure. We bring together the notions of territory, governmentality, imaginaries and subjectivities, to clarify how exactly hydraulic infrastructure acts to transform relations between space, people and materiality. We start by introducing territorialization as a process of ‘ordering things’ in a certain space and time through different techniques of government. When then show how, at the base of such territorialization processes, are imaginaries that contain normative ideas about how space and socio-territorial relations should be ordered. Imaginaries are consequently materialized through hydraulic infrastructure through the inscription of morals, values and norms in infrastructure design, construction and operation. This set of materialities and relations embedded in infrastructure brings changes to the existing relations between space, water and people. In particular, we highlight the repercussions of infrastructure for how people understand and relate to each other, the environment, water, technology and space: in other words, how subjectivities change as an effect of hydraulic infrastructure constitution. Last, we show how infrastructure and the related hydrosocial territories that develop around it are a dynamic arena of contestation and transformation. We argue that socio-material fractures, emerging counter-imaginaries and the disruptive capacities of subjectivities constantly challenge the ‘fixes’ that infrastructures aim to inscribe in hydrosocial territories. Throughout the paper, we use empirical examples from recent research on hydraulic infrastructure and territorial transformations to ground the conceptual ideas.
Rapid developments associated with large-scale transport infrastructure have exacerbated ecological risks, posing major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services. Construction of ecological security patterns (ESPs) can effectively mitigate this threat, but existing construction of ESPs lacks consideration of the risk to landscape connectivity and resilience, as well as zoning optimization at a finer resolution. This study focused on the region along the China-Laos Railway to evaluate the landscape ecological risk (LER) based on the potential-connectedness-resilience framework and extracted ESP elements according to the LER evaluation. Clustering of LER and ecological quality index was introduced to facilitate more targeted management of ESP. We found that the regional LER was most likely elevated because the proportion of LER at the medium level and above was close to 50 %. Moreover, the segmentation and penetration of high-risk areas into low-risk areas was prominent. The distribution of low LER areas was notably shaped by regional resilience, while road expansion would create many medium and higher risk areas, and the development of industrial parks would generate high risks in urban peripheries. 2,615.88 km of ecological corridors enabled the 17,362.08 km² ecological sources to be effectively connected. 33 ecological nodes and 115 stepping stones were extracted as valid complements to key areas of weak connectivity. Priority treatment of specific sources (4.88 %) and ecological corridors (29.93 %) enhances the resilience of ESP. Our study provides a method for integrating the assessment of ecological risks arising from future regional development with the construction and optimization of ESPs, which can be promoted in ecological conservation planning in developing countries driven by infrastructure and industrial parks.
The rising presence of China in Laos is a very visible and potent force of change throughout the country. Until recently, this was consolidated largely in areas along the Lao-China border but is now visible throughout the country and particularly in Lao cities. This is particularly so since China embarked on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has brought China closer to Laos, metaphorically and literally. This chapter argues that the rising presence of China in Laos has also entrenched a sense of Lao-ness. Laos is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, which has existed in its current form only since 1975 and has a weak sense of national consciousness. This chapter contends that the issue of China in Laos is a significant and rare driver of national unity across the Lao population. This is something on which many Lao people have opinions and/or concerns and produces a sense of we-ness or togetherness as citizens of Laos amongst an otherwise disparate population.
This dissertation provides an ethnography of global China centered on one infrastructural corridor in Northern Laos. Through an analysis of three interrelated infrastructure projects that have become emblematic of China’s Belt and Road Initiative—the Laos–China Railway, Laos– China Economic Corridor, and Boten Special Economic Zone—I offer a grounded view on a story that is often told from faraway, geopolitical perspectives. I propose the concept of the infrastructure frontier as a more nuanced way to think about China’s global expansion. A discursive and material phenomena, the infrastructure frontier is a capitalist project that remakes space and time to create conditions to accumulate capital. The infrastructure frontier is made through the discursive repetition of the need to unblock Laos; undervaluation of land; spectacle and performance to attract capital; more-than-economic logics of Chinese capital; and both Lao and Chinese state-support. Infrastructure frontier-making simultaneously encloses space to open it to certain types of “development,” capital, or exploitation. I show how the corridor and Boten were reinvented as zones of opportunity through performance, spectacle, and speculation. In addition, I show how the Lao state assembles land for railway construction and in anticipation for future value appropriation through techniques that create a lack of calculability and undervalue land. Furthermore, the dissertation demonstrates that rather than predatory, debt provides an outlet for overaccumulation by delaying devaluation of domestic Chinese capital. This is possible due to the involvement of Chinese SOEs and joint ventures that can take on long-term risk or transfer it to lower-level actors. Finally, this dissertation details local experiences of land loss and compensation. Rather than foregrounding dispossession, it explores how displacement and infrastructural temporalities work together to illuminate how people navigate suspension despite long periods of waiting, uncertainty around land, knowledge that past projects did not materialize, and feelings that participation and redress are not possible. In sum, this dissertation illustrates how the frontier is made and remade by capital and the state through infrastructure.
https://thepeoplesmap.net/project/laos-china-railway/
China's vast construction of infrastructure around the world involves not only promises of trans-national cooperation, connectivity, and national development, but also local dispossession. Construction requires large tracts of land, often leading to the displacement of local people. In Laos, investments since the early-2000s have entailed land loss and questionable safeguard practices. Despite pressure on Chinese policy banks and through the BRI to strengthen regulations for infrastructure construction, the influx of BRI megaprojects in Laos has exacerbated ongoing social and environmental issues. Using Laos-China Railway land compensation as a case, this working paper presents a grounded and multi-scalar analysis of Chinese development finance and environmental and social safeguards. Through policy analysis, ethnographic, and qualitative methods, I examine regulatory frameworks related to displacement and land compensation for the railway-first, in the context of broader changes across Chinese development finance, second, in terms of how villagers experience implementation on the ground, and finally, how domestic regulations evolved through the project's development cycle. As existing projects are subsumed within the BRI this paper asks: Have safeguards improved as BRI development finance was introduced? Which host regulations were in place when project agreements were signed and how have they been updated throughout the project's development? Focusing on one project underscores the need to dissect how policy bank safeguards compare and interact with domestic policies and local implementation. This case points to the challenges of continued reliance on host country standards in contrast to pressures to improve safeguards domestically and with international development finance. I highlight how these challenges are exacerbated by high-profile projects and argue that more fine-grained, project-based analysis of how safeguards are used begins to answer questions of whether pressures to improve Chinese development finance translate to the ground.
China's vast construction of infrastructure around the world involves not only promises of trans-national cooperation, connectivity, and national development, but also local dispossession. Construction requires large tracts of land, often leading to the displacement of local people. In Laos, investments since the early-2000s have entailed land loss and questionable safeguard practices. Despite pressure on Chinese policy banks and through the BRI to strengthen regulations for infrastructure construction, the influx of BRI megaprojects in Laos has exacerbated ongoing social and environmental issues. Using Laos-China Railway land compensation as a case, this working paper presents a grounded and multi-scalar analysis of Chinese development finance and environmental and social safeguards. Through policy analysis, ethnographic, and qualitative methods, I examine regulatory frameworks related to displacement and land compensation for the railway-first, in the context of broader changes across Chinese development finance, second, in terms of how villagers experience implementation on the ground, and finally, how domestic regulations evolved through the project's development cycle. As existing projects are subsumed within the BRI this paper asks: Have safeguards improved as BRI development finance was introduced? Which host regulations were in place when project agreements were signed and how have they been updated throughout the project's development? Focusing on one project underscores the need to dissect how policy bank safeguards compare and interact with domestic policies and local implementation. This case points to the challenges of continued reliance on host country standards in contrast to pressures to improve safeguards domestically and with international development finance. I highlight how these challenges are exacerbated by high-profile projects and argue that more fine-grained, project-based analysis of how safeguards are used begins to answer questions of whether pressures to improve Chinese development finance translate to the ground.
This article examines the contingent and contentious processes through which debt is created to finance major infrastructure projects. I contend that practices aimed at structuring credit relations into debt-financed projects often have important, unexpected, and under-recognized implications on the ground. My argument is illustrated through an analysis of the cascading impacts resulting from the making of a China–Lao sovereign debt agreement to fund the trans-Laos railway, an infrastructure project that is part of the broader Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The failure of the government to deliver the promised credit on time had multiscalar financial ramifications. Chinese enterprises that had been contracted to implement the railway were coerced into funding construction themselves, and the ensuing financial turmoil exacerbated the exploitative conditions experienced by construction laborers. As Lao laborers sought to resist exploitation in the form of delayed and denied wage payments, they were gradually substituted by their more vulnerable Chinese counterparts. Dynamics in the making of BRI-induced Lao sovereign debt therefore rendered some perceived beneficiaries of the interstate financial arrangement, such as Chinese enterprises and workers, its victims. I argue that the contradictory realities of this high-profile financial deal demonstrate the need for more grounded inquiries into the politics of sovereign debt making.
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.
In 2013, President Xi Jinping formulated China's vision of Eurasian connectivity: The Silk Road Economic Belt. The strategy envisages the construction of infrastructure networks that will enmesh the Eurasian continent and form an interconnected space of exchange. Since the plan was announced, the Economic Belt has attracted much academic and media attention in terms of the infrastructure being built and its future potentialities. At the same time, questions about the sustainability of this infrastructure in a dynamic Sino–Inner Asian borderland, with its highly fluid terrain and socio-political geography, have been virtually absent from the debate.
The inevitable decay, maintenance and social ambiguity surrounding transport infrastructure lack the appeal associated with new construction projects; yet, discussing them is crucial in the context of mega initiatives such as the Economic Belt. It is important to bring it back ‘down to the ground’ and into more mundane terms. By zooming in on a single desert road in northwest China that has been designated as a crucial conduit in the westward arc of the Economic Belt, this article draws attention to the social complexity and ecological vulnerability of transport infrastructure in the Sino–Inner Asian borderlands. At one scale, this infrastructure is part of China's vision of globalization; at another scale, however, it is firmly embedded in local contexts. By pushing the political, ecological and material complexity of road maintenance to the centre of our inquiry, the article offers a new perspective on the current construction boom and its sustainability.
The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional
integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese
financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet
most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be
emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI
as a relational, contested process - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that
sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and
classic geopolitical analysis to study China’s global investments “from the ground”. Our case studies
reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that
sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers
in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful
approach for grounding China’s role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.
This article investigates long-term processes of financialization unfolding in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, engaging with literatures on financialization and political economy of disaster and development. The article probes the evolving financialized social relations in Nepal in the context of humanitarian relief and reconstruction, paying particular attention to processes through which wide-scale political economies enter into the daily lives of disaster victims and play key roles in transforming their economic practice and subjectivity. In the name of relief and reconstruction, foreign investment combined with urban surplus capital has circulated within Nepal as finance in rural, earthquake-affected areas—making the earthquakes a truly lucrative disaster. The article deploys a conjunctural approach to understanding disaster financialization as a multiscalar process constituted through geoeconomic logics, state–market complexes, and economic subjectivity. Each of these dimensions of disaster financialization is elaborated in separate sections of the article. We conclude by cautioning against both celebrations and outright rejections of finance as a viable and desirable modality for disaster reconstruction—calling instead for a more nuanced understanding of disaster financialization and its implications for affected populations.
Previously articulated within several regional multilateral frameworks, the “China-Laos Railway” eventually turned into a flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Started in 2016 and planned to be completed in late 2021, this project will provide Laos with unprecedented railway infrastructure, linking its capital Vientiane with China through the northern border town of Boten. This paper critically scrutinizes the underlying geo-economic win-win rhetoric of coupling China’s regional BRI ambitions with Laos’ national vision of transforming into a land-linked country. Understanding the newest BRI labeling of infrastructural connectivity against the backdrop of Laos’ and the region’s longer-lasting neoliberal developmental trajectory, I examine the financial mechanism of the railway project and the different temporal and spatial scales of Laos’ and China’s calculation of potential benefits. These are juxtaposed with the empirical reality of already visible dynamics and impacts of Chinese investment alongside the railway. Together, they tend to paint a future of Chinese profits at the expense of Laos’ sustainable long-term development. Contributing to much-needed grounded accounts of local unfoldings of China-backed megaprojects, I pay particular attention to vernacular discourse and experience to fully understand the nature, processes and impacts of BRI financing.
The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been framed by critics as a threat to the national territorial sovereignty of postcolonial societies. Such concerns hinge on conventional notions of sovereignty as an abstract form of power possessed by the state and lost to global forces. However, the transfer of domestic lands into the hands of foreign investors is complicated by the contested and relational nature of authority in resource frontier spaces. Critical scholarship has shown that sovereignty in practice – the production of control and authority within spatial fields – is dynamic, contested, and variegated. It has further staked out an ontology of sovereignty as relational, although not explicitly stated in such terms. This paper employs the insights of relational geography to advance theorization of sovereignty's relationality: the contested and consensual relations among heterogeneous actors that produce and transform authority in complex and variegated spaces. I demonstrate the value of this approach by examining Vietnamese and Chinese industrial tree plantation companies' differential access to land in Southern Laos, based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Each company differed in their access to land granted to them by the central Lao government due to the types of socio‐political relations that they established at various administrative scales of the Lao state. Such relations shaped their co‐production of sovereignty driven by logics of centralized state territorialization and capital accumulation. When such state‐capital relations broke down, opportunities emerged for resistance by peasants who shifted relations of sovereignty toward their own interests.
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the largest infrastructure scheme in our lifetime, bringing unprecedented geopolitical and economic shifts far larger than previous rising powers. Concerns about its environmental impacts are legitimate and threaten to thwart China's ambitions, especially since there is little precedent for analysing and planning for environmental impacts of massive infrastructure development at the scale of BRI. In this paper, we review infrastructure development under BRI to characterise the nature and types of environmental impacts and demonstrate how social, economic and political factors can shape these impacts. We first address the ambiguity around how BRI is defined. Then we describe our interdisciplinary framework for considering the nature of its environmental impacts, showing how impacts interact and aggregate across multiple spatiotemporal scales creating cumulative impacts. We also propose a typology of BRI infrastructure, and describe how economic and socio-political drivers influence BRI infrastructure and the nature of its environmental impacts. Increasingly, environmental policies associated with BRI are being designed and implemented, although there are concerns about how these will translate effectively into practice. Planning and addressing environmental issues associated with the BRI is immensely complex and multi-scaled. Understanding BRI and its environment impacts is the first step for China and countries along the routes to ensure the assumed positive socioeconomic impacts associated with BRI are sustainable.
The introduction to this themed issue, ‘New Geographies of Development: Grounding China’s Global Integration’, contributes to ongoing reconceptualization of research approaches to China’s global integration and situates the contributions of the issue within the growing body of multiscalar and ethnographic research on the subject. Grounded studies (1) complexify the actors involved in China’s global integration to focus on those who work in a variety of (un)intentional ways to attract, implement, sustain and resist specific initiatives that constitute China’s overseas activities; (2) revise fixed notions of core and periphery, especially with respect to the origins, flows and destinations of capital, power and goods emanating from China’s metropolises; (3) and rescale the state, capital and elite interests to identify the key scalar moments at which big policy ideas are transformed into new development geographies. This introduction and the papers in the issue focus specifically on those actions and actors whose work is key to extending the natural resource hinterlands of China, China’s firms and specific subnational interests in partner states to the Americas, Africa and Eurasia under the policy banners of the ‘Go Out strategy’, the ‘Great Western Development Plan’ and the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’.
Hydraulic City explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. The book demonstrates how Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.
This article develops a framework for conceptualising authoritarian governance and rule in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. After introducing the national and academic context, which go a significant way towards understanding the paucity of comparative political work on Laos, we propose an approach to studying post-socialist authoritarian and single-party rule that highlights the key political-institutional, cultural-historical and spatial-environmental sources of party-state power and authority. In adopting this approach, we seek to redirect attention to the centralising structures of rule under the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, illustrating how authoritarian institutions of the “party-state” operate in and through multiple scales, from the central to the local level. At a time when the country is garnering greater attention than at any time since the Vietnam War, we argue that this examination of critical transitions in Laos under conditions of resource-intensive development, intensifying regional and global integration, and durable one-party authoritarian rule, establishes a framework for future research on the party-state system in Laos, and for understanding and contextualising the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party regime in regional comparative perspective.
The Belt and Road Initiative will greatly influence the future of global trade. However, it may also promote permanent environmental degradation. We call for rigorous strategic environmental and social assessments, raising the bar for environmental protection worldwide.
This article looks at a trans-Himalayan borderland to see how new road development projects affect social and sovereign relationships across mountain landscapes between Chinese Tibet and Mustang, Nepal. Research asked about local experiences with new forms of motorized transport and popular consumption of Chinese-manufactured commodities to understand what factors led the Nepali state to undertake new bureaucratic projects in a historically peripheral space. Employing a dialectic framework of mobility and containment, a materialist-territorial analysis reveals how transborder infrastructure development affects trade relations and consumption practices in the Nepal–China borderlands and, in turn, how these dynamics condition state-making processes at social and geopolitical levels. Following the cross-scalar trajectory of one rural road project from local grassroots initiative to national development program to international transportation network, I argue that the economic interests of a place-based project with regional cultural connections set in motion an expanding presence of Nepali state apparatuses in a trans-Himalayan borderland space.
Infrastructure tends to be conceived as stabilized and ‘black-boxed’ with little interaction from users. This fixity is in flux in ways not yet fully considered in either geography or science and technology studies (STS). Driven by environmental and economic concerns, water utilities are increasingly introducing efficiency technologies into infrastructure networks. These, I argue, serve as ‘mediating technologies’ shifting long-accepted socio-technical and environmental relationships in cities. The essay argues for a new approach to infrastructure that, by integrating insights from STS and geography, highlights its malleability and offers conceptual tools to consider how this malleability might be fostered.
Since it was set out in speeches by China’s Premier Xi Jinping in September and October 2013, discussion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has proliferated in China. We argue that the scale and density of this discussion can usefully be conceptualized as an emergent geopolitical culture, reworking geopolitical narratives and spatial policies established in China in the second half of the twentieth century. In charting this emergence, we examine the ways in which the BRI links the reordering of China’s economic geography with articulations of China and the world. Surveying BRI as an emergent geopolitical culture, we draw on the example of the narratives of familiarity, partnership, and location vis-à-vis China and Singapore. Our conclusions reflect on how the BRI is appropriated to visions of China’s destiny. Key Words: Belt and Road Initiative, China, geopolitical culture, Singapore.
Mainstream portrayals of Chinese overseas land investments tend to treat Chinese capital as monolithic, synonymous with the Chinese state, and extracting resources from other countries unhindered. These portrayals flatten host country landscapes where investment occurs, obscure the embeddedness and diversity of Chinese investors, and ignore the spatially contingent channels through which Chinese capital, actors, and goods flow. In response, this article suggests that methodological shifts in the land grabs literature could address recent calls for grounding studies of global China. It compares the cases of Chinese banana and rubber investments in Laos to demonstrate that sub-national state actors, histories and material realities of land politics, and the diversity of investors across sectors and regions must be considered. The contrast between how the two types of Chinese agricultural investments have been established and governed is best understood through comparative, grounded research attentive to multiple perspectives and scales.
This paper challenges dominant governance paradigms by exploring the world of infrastructure investment, referred to by the industry as the ‘infraspace’. Starting with financial institutions and multilateral development agencies that steer global infrastructure money, it will trace the financial, technical, bureaucratic and aspirational journey of infrastructure and infrastructure planning. Examining the sociofinancial architecture of infrastructure and development pulls into focus the relationship between states, state-owned enterprises and multilateral financial institutions. Rather than focus primarily on the social and cultural consequences of infrastructural change, however, or how the political promise and aspiration of infrastructure measures up to its everyday use, the point of departure for this paper is the social, economic and political relations that produce infrastructure. Such an examination requires a journey beyond the state and through infraspace.
At a time when the shortcomings of neoliberal development are well known, China's Belt and Road Initiative offers both an opportunity and a requirement to revisit the question of a more inclusive, equitable approach to infrastructure development. This article examines the case of the Northern Economic Corridor, a highway-centered regional trade corridor constructed through northwestern Laos in the early-mid 2000s that was co-financed by the Asian Development Bank and the governments of China and Thailand, and that has been subsequently included in the BRI as one of a group of regional corridors following the historical trajectories of the Silk Road. By examining the discursive politics of infrastructure's formal geography – and focusing on the practices that manage how publicly funded projects address predictable, negative impacts – this paper engages with emerging research on the BRI, wider scholarship on infrastructure, and the political geography of transnational development cooperation and financing at multiple scales. Specifically, I show how vulnerable populations were excluded from the protections of infrastructure mitigation along an early BRI project, and use this to argue that scholars, community advocates, infrastructure planners, financiers, regulators and others engaged with the BRI and other new infrastructure initiatives should rethink established conventions that demote the attention paid to “indirect” impacts. I highlight the arena of formal-geographic mitigation planning as a key field of engagement in the struggle to make new infrastructure live up to expectations about inclusive and equitable development.
China’s borderlands have received increased investment and policy attention since Beijing formally launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. This special issue, comprised of four research articles and a photo essay, is designed to provide a timely intervention into the growing literature seeking to situate and assess this important policy campaign. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in China’s southwestern, northwestern, and northern borderlands, the contributing authors analyze recent borderland transformations against the backdrop of the BRI. However, by shifting the analytical focus to prioritize voices and events in borderlands, the papers de-center Beijing-centric discourse on the BRI, and provide urgent reminders of region-specific geographies and histories. Taken together, the papers underscore the persistent social complexity of borderland situations, revealing intricate processes of resistance, adaptation, and muddling through, while highlighting continuities and ruptures associated with the present moment.
This paper analyses the role of roadbuilding as a process of state territorialisation in post-war Sri Lanka. In the aftermath of a brutal civil war (1983–2009), and in lieu of a broader peace and reconciliation process between Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities, road infrastructure has been promoted by the state as essential to the region's recovery and nation's sovereignty. Roads were to bring national unity and political integration. We interrogate such claims, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jaffna and neighbouring areas to cast doubt on the prospects of new roads to ameliorate ethnic tensions. Rather, as militarised security discourses and policies continue to dominate the Sri Lankan public sphere, such schemes can be understood as part of broader Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist project to consolidate territorial control in restive parts of the country. Our research suggests that, rather than facilitating rehabilitation and recovery, road networks mirror pre-existing fault lines and entrench the privileged position of the military in Sri Lankan society. Such shifts do little to avail persistent minority sentiments of political marginalisation, aggravating social fractures and re-constituting the hegemony of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism.
This article examines the shifting dimensions of Chinese infrastructural aid in Nepal, focusing on the politics of anticipation and enunciation that shape Nepali perceptions of Chinese-facilitated development and negotiations concerning Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing from ethnographic research focused on sites of ongoing and planned infrastructure development in Nepal’s two northern districts of Rasuwa and Gorkha, we analyze the uncertain remaking of these areas into trans-Himalayan power corridors. Our examination reveals the gamut of transitions, opportunities, reorientations, and expectations that the BRI and other forms of Chinese investment evoke in Nepal, showing how politics articulate infrastructures, and vice versa. After reviewing the historical context of Nepal-China relations, our empirical analysis begins in late 2014 when China became the single largest source of foreign direct investment in Nepal, continues through several rounds of negotiations about the BRI and other forms of Chinese infrastructural investment and aid, and concludes with a review of significant Nepal-China agreements at the Second Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing in April 2019. Tacking between remote construction sites, scenes of diplomatic debate, borderland villages, investment summits, and speculative media coverage, we demonstrate how the Belt and Road Initiative is differently enacted and co-constructed by a variety of Nepali and Chinese actors who interpret, reimagine, and rhetorically appropriate the BRI within their own narrations of future possibility.
This article shows how both state building and nation making processes have intensified the sense of national appropriation of water and how water bodies, landscapes, and infrastructures became an integral part of national identity during the early post-colonial hydropolitics era (1948–67). Drawing on the cases of India and Israel, it shows conceptually, discursively, and empirically how these two distinguishable but interrelated processes lead to conflict and visible and hidden forms of violence at multiple scales. Water bodies, infrastructures, and landscapes are used on the one hand as attempts to homogenise the state space and on the other to downplay other forms of identities. In short, these processes help to understand hydraulic imaginaries, state power, identity politics and infrastructural transformations linked to post-colonial hydropolitics and its associated violence in the histories of the Jordan River and Indus River disputes.
Surprisingly, perhaps, China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative expresses a familiar mix of the security–development nexus and liberal interdependence thesis: Chinese leaders expect economic development and integration will stabilise and secure neighbouring states and improve inter-state relations. However, drawing on the record of China’s intensive economic interaction with Myanmar, we argue that the opposite outcome may occur, for two reasons. First, capitalist development is inherently conflict-prone. Second, moreover, China’s cross-border economic relations today are shaped by state transformation – the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses. Accordingly, economic relations often emerge not from coherent national strategies, but from the uncoordinated, even contradictory, activities of various state and non-state agencies at multiple scales, which may exacerbate capitalist development’s conflictual aspects and undermine official policy goals. In the Sino-Myanmar case, the lead Chinese actors creating and managing cross-border economic engagements are sub-national agencies and enterprises based in, or operating through, Yunnan province. The rapacious form of development they have pursued has exacerbated insecurity, helped to reignite ethnic conflict in Myanmar’s borderlands, and plunged bilateral relations into crisis. Consequently, the Chinese government has had to change its policy and intervene in Myanmar’s domestic affairs to promote peace negotiations.
In Material Politics, author Andrew Barry reveals that as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins, and impact. Presents an original theoretical approach to political geography by revealing the paradoxical relationship between materials and politics. Explores how political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information about their performance, origins, and impact. Studies the example of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline - a fascinating experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility - and its wide-spread negative political impact. Capitalizes on the growing interdisciplinary interest, especially within geography and social theory, about the critical role of material artefacts in political life.
This article reviews Chinese-language writings on the ideas of a Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road that have proliferated in the last few years, now under the aegis of and visualized as One Belt, One Road (一带一路). We examine how these narratives articulate with geopolitical and strategic ones in China before exploring the history of the idea of Silk Road(s). An excavation of their origins in nineteenth-century German imperial geography leads us to reflect on the past and present relations between states, empires, and geopolitics and to begin to chart the range of responses to One Belt, One Road.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a call for an open and inclusive (mutually beneficial) model of cooperative economic, political and cultural exchange (globalization) that draws on the deep-seated meanings of the ancient Silk Roads. While it reflects China’s rise as a global power, and its industrial redeployment, increased outward investment and need to diversify energy sources and routes, the BRI involves the establishment of a framework for open cooperation and new multilateral financial instruments designed to lay the infrastructural and industrial foundations to secure and solidify China’s relations with countries along the Silk Roads and to extend the march of modernization and poverty reduction to emerging countries.
We examine the patterns and characteristics of private investment in Laos, and how these evolve in relation to the Lao government's investment incentive policies in particular, and the wider State policies in general. Our goals are to: 1) systematically describe and analyse the patterns and characteristics of private investment in the country; and 2) analyse investment outcomes in terms of economic growth, poverty reduction and livelihoods. We argue that while private investments in the resource sector have contributed to the economic growth, they have also negatively impacted local resources and communities. From a policy perspective, we highlight the need to examine the actual significance of policy incentives provided by the Lao government, especially with regard to its ability to direct investment decisions, geographically and sectorally.
Since Xi Jinping became leader in 2012, he has redirected Chinese foreign policy. This article examines the role of peripheral diplomacy in Xi’s emerging grand strategy. While it is popular to look to theories of the international system – offensive realism and liberal institutionalism – to explore this issue, this article follows constructivism to take seriously the role of ideas and domestic politics in foreign policy-making. Through an analysis of official and unofficial sources, it traces linkages between ideas, institutions, and behavior in Chinese foreign policy. In particular, it argues that Beijing is combining new ideas (China Dream, Asia Dream), new policies (comprehensive diplomacy and security), new institutions (AIIB) and new projects (BRI) to build what Xi calls the ‘community of shared destiny.’ The goal is to weave neighboring countries into a Sino-centric network of economic, political, cultural, and security relations. Beijing’s grand strategy thus is to re-constitute the regional order – and eventually global order – with new governance ideas, norms, and rules. Hence while the Asian region is an important focus of Chinese foreign policy, Beijing’s peripheral diplomacy is about more than win-win cooperation in the neighborhood. It also acts as the means to the much larger end of promoting China’s new vision of global governance. Theoretically, the article shows how ‘connectivity’ is more than an issue of the ‘hardware’ of physical infrastructure; it is also a ‘software’ issue of the connectivity of ideas, institutions, and behavior in diplomacy itself.
This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.
“Voluntary” land transfer agreements, negotiated directly between “willing buyers and willing sellers”, present a seemingly empowering alternative to the use of legal instruments for land acquisition or transfer which entail forced displacement. Yet asymmetrical bargaining power between the negotiating parties can undermine the fairness of negotiated outcomes and the right of the sellers to a “no-displacement” option. Viewed against a complex background of bourgeoning land transfers in multiple sites, this article examines rights-based and risks-based approaches to negotiated settlements, concluding that measures to address asymmetries in bargaining power must look beyond enhanced negotiation procedures to address underlying social and political dimensions.
This paper addresses the unstable material and social environments that large-scale road construction projects attempt to tame and fix in place as a way of exploring the affective force of roads as technologies for delivering progress and development. Drawing from our ethnography of the construction of two roads in Peru, we trace the disruptive and destabilising processes through which roads come to hold the promise of transformation. We approach roads with curiosity as to their capacity to enchant with respect to three specific promises: speed, political integration and economic connectivity. We suggest that whilst the abstractions of engineering and politics are provisional attempts to demarcate the capacity of roads to bring about the enhancement of international trade, promote the growth of national economies and provide economic opportunity for those prepared to engage with the road’s potential, that these practices alone are not sufficient to explain the passionate promise that roads hold in Peruvian society. We suggest, rather, that the promise of stability is invigorated by mundane engagements with unruly forces that threaten to subvert the best laid plans of politicians and engineers. We argue that such forces are integral to the ways in which roads come to endure as enchanted sites of contemporary state-craft despite their capacity to disappoint and/or the likelihood of generating negative consequences. The political and material process of creating roads, calls forth competing, unauthorised and openly unstable dimensions of being – shifting soils and water courses, side-roads and short-cuts which both challenge and reinvigorate the promises of speed, integration and connectivity.
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
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This article examines the role of water infrastructure in the production of state power, and advances an understanding of nonhumans as power brokers. While state power is increasingly understood as the effect of material practices and processes, I draw on the idea that objects are ‘force-full’ to argue that infrastructure helped cement federal state power in Tijuana over the twentieth century, and simultaneously limited the spaces of stateness in surprising ways. To support my argument, I examine three sets of water infrastructure in Tijuana, Mexico. First, I examine the key constitutional edicts, laws, and treaties that enabled bureaucratic development and staked territorial claims on water during Mexico’s liberal era (1876–1911) and post-revolutionary period. Second, I trace the development of Tijuana’s flood control and potable water conveyance networks, designed and built between the 1960s and the 1980s, which enabled rapid urban growth but ultimately cultivated dependency on a distant, state engineered water source. Finally, I show how the ordinary infrastructures of water supply—such as barrels, cisterns, and buckets, common tools in Tijuana homes—both coexist with and limit state power, resulting in variegated geographies of institutional authority, punctuated by alternative spaces of rule. Together, these infrastructures form the ‘hydrosocial cycle’ of Tijuana, which I use to illustrate the uneven spatiality of state power. In conclusion, I draw on insights from object-oriented philosophy and science and technology studies to move past the anthropocentric notion of infrastructure as ‘power tools’—handy implements used by humans to exercise dominion—toward tool-power: the idea that objects-in-themselves are wellsprings of power.
Kyaw Yin Hlaing is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore.
The author wishes to thank Woon Yong Hong, Bacharee Puengpak, and N. Ganesan for their research and editorial assistance.
1. Because most of my interviewees were still living or working in Laos, they do not wish to be quoted by name. I therefore will not give citations to all the interviews I have quoted in the article. Of the 36 people I interviewed, 9 are present or former government officials, 11 are present or former NGO workers, 4 are students, and 12 are business people.
2. Constitution of Lao PDR, Law on Government of Lao PDR, Law on Local Administration of Lao PDR (Vientiane: Public Administration and Civil Service Authority, 2005), p. 4.
3. Maha Khampeuy Vannasopha, Religious Affairs in Lao PDR (Vientiane: Department of Religious Affairs, 2005), pp. 18-25.
4. Ibid., pp. 28-37.
5. Ibid., pp. 38-43.
6. Merilee Grindle, Challenging the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
7. Governance Reform and Livelihood Strengthening Programme, "Local Governance Self-assessment Report: Khammouane Province", 2005, pp. 26-31.
8. International Development Association, "Country Assistance Strategy for the Lao People's Democratic Republic", 10 March 2005, p. 8.
9. AusAid, Laos Australia Development Cooperation Program (2004-10) (Canberra: AusAid, 2005); Hayashida Kazuno, "Teaching Law and Political Science at the National University of Laos", Nagoya University Center for Asian Legal Exchange Newsletter (No. 3, 2001).
10. International Development Association, "Country Assistance Strategy for the Lao People's Democratic Republic", pp. 8-9.
11. Lao PDR, "Background Paper on Governance" (Vientiane, March 2003); Governance Reform and Livelihood Strengthening Programme, "Local Governance Self-assessment Report: Khammouane Province", 2005.
12. International Development Association, "Country Assistance Strategy for the Lao People's Democratic Republic", 10 March 2005; Governance Reform and Livelihood Strengthening Programme, "Local Governance Self-assessment Report: Khammouane Province", 2005.
13. Governance Reform and Livelihood Strengthening Programme, "Local Governance Self-assessment Report: Khammouane Province", pp. 37-38.
14. Patrick Keuleers, Corruption in Lao PDR (Bangkok: UNDP, March 2004), p. 14.
15. Lao PDR, "Background Paper on Governance" (Vientiane, March 2003), p. 8.
16. International Development Association, "Country Assistance Strategy for the Lao People's Democratic Republic", p. 8.
17. Governance Reform and Livelihood Strengthening Programme, "Local Governance Self-assessment Report: Khammouane Province", pp. 17-35.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 27.
20. Keuleers, op. cit.
21. Governance Reform and Livelihood Strengthening Programme, "Local Governance Self-assessment Report: Khammouane Province", pp. 17-35.
22. Keuleers, op. cit., p. 17.
23. The EU's Relations with Lao People's Democratic Republic, http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/lao/intro/index.htm; "Lao PDR Donors' Matrix", 2005, table 1.
24. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices — 2005", 8 March 2006.
25. "Hmong Refugees: Laos Blames Thailand for 'Inhumane Act'", Nation, 2 February 2006.
26. World Bank, "Lao PDR Economic Monitor", October 2005, pp. 1-2.
In this paper I want to consider whether actor-network theory [ANT] gives rise to a new kind of geography, or, perhaps more specifically, a new kind of geographical analysis. The paper therefore seeks to identify the main types of spaces implicated in the typical network configurations found in actor-network studies. Following a review of the ANT literature I conclude that two main spatial types can be discerned, linked to the degrees of remote control and autonomy found in networks. I characterise these two types as ‘spaces of prescription’ and ‘spaces of negotiation’. I go on to elaborate what a geography of prescription and negotiation might imply both for spatial analysis and actor-network theory. This paper is therefore one attempt to think through some of the implications that ANT holds for the study of space.
: Multi-scalar or multi-site power relations offer two contrasting ways of understanding the shifting geography of state power. In this paper, we argue for a different starting point, one that favours a topological understanding of state spatiality over more conventional topographical accounts. In contrast to a vertical or horizontal imagery of the geography of state power, what states possess, we suggest, is reach, not height. In doing so, we draw from Sassen (2006, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press) a vocabulary capable of portraying the renegotiation of powers that has taken place between central government in the UK and one of its key city regions, the South East of England; one that highlights an assemblage of political actors, some public, some private, where negotiations take place between elements of central and local actors “lodged” within the region, not acting “above”, “below” or “alongside” it. The articulation of political demands in such a context has less to do with “jumping scale” or formalizing extensive network connections and more to do with the ability to reach directly into a “centralized” politics where proximity and reach play across one another in particular ways.
In a manner analogous to Lukes' classic study of power in the early 1970s, this paper sets out three spatial vocabularies of power - territorial, networked and topological. Each spatial frame, it is suggested, has its usefulness in helping us to understand the ways in which power works itself out spatially. But, as in Lukes' study, the first two accounts of power are found wanting in certain respects; in this instance because of the limitations of the topographical framework which underpins them. In order to come to terms with the changing dynamics of a more complex, globalized world, it is argued that a topological appreciation of the workings of power is a better starting point. At a minimum, the paper sets out to show how the ability of powerful bodies to draw distant others within close reach or construct the close at hand at a distance, through relations of connection and simultaneity, opens up an understanding of power more in tune with the spatial reworkings of authority and influence today.