Paper short abstract:

China is changing the power relations in Eurasia through the Belt and Road. Eurasia becomes a region, where multiple interests clash. Multi-level governance that yields a local, sustainable development can complement the BRI in regionalization and greater economic development.

Paper long abstract:

The significance of regions is increasingly accompanied by steering mechanisms between globalization and regionalization (Koller & Voskresenski, 2019). Throughout the last decade, development geographies are under constant change towards a multipolar order, especially in Asian regions. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China’s attempt to initiate growth in Western China and Eurasia that eventually creates a new power-equilibrium (Chun, 2017; Harper, 2019). Those processes to higher connectivity and mobility within a greater region (regionalization) and entail institutional region-building (regionalism) (Söderbaum, 2016). Although the BRI seems partially successful, current challenges relate to limited transparency and procurement, need for standards, questions on the regional impact (Pechlaner et al., 2020), institutional governance structures or China’s leadership (Beeson & Li, 2016) or economic integration (Boamah & Appiah-Kubi, 2019).

Eurasia posses a strategic position in China's efforts as an investment recipient and transit region (Harper, 2019). The role Eurasia plays and its economic integration is uncertain. Eurasia is all the more advised to perceive the BRI as a chance for greater transnational connectivity within Eurasia, as it includes complementaries economies of similar cultural background and development status.

Scholars assume that regionalization and the maintenance of local interests along with the BRI are only sustainable if officials and researchers combine processes of regionalism and multi-level governance (Kettunen, 2019; Thees, 2020). Therefore, the research question evolves: How can transnational governance mediate in regionalism to assist a locally-bound regionalization within the NSR? Exploratory research with interviews and scenario analysis reveals learnings on the integration of Eurasian countries.

Paper short abstract:

This paper applies assemblage theory to investigate the emergence and contingency of BRI, setting out to understand the ways in which different factors, both human and non-human, were framed and constructed so as to constitute a global BRI.

Paper long abstract:

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is predominantly understood as China’s global strategy to address its economic problems, pursue its security interests, and seek global hegemony. However, little attention has been paid to underlying assumptions, discursive performances, and constitutive effects that made a global BRI possible. By applying assemblage thinking, the paper explores the emergence and contingency of BRI, setting out to understand the ways in which different factors were framed and constructed so as to constitute a global BRI. The paper argues that BRI was a socially constructed assemblage of diverse elements developed through a multi-level and non-linear process, rather than a purely rational product resulting from a top-down policymaking process. In other words, by breaking down what the Chinese government has claimed about BRI into its component parts, this paper has found no inherent essence, being global, open, and cooperative as such, to BRI. Instead, this global BRI was an emergent assemblage, largely constituted through three interconnected stages, and was contingent, subject to the influence of discursive constructions, practices, and material entities such as geography and technology. This assemblage-based post-structural analysis contributes significantly to the understanding of BRI via the assemblage of a variety of practices, discourses, human agents, and non-human actants. More importantly, it enables the researcher to explore policies like BRI which are both broad and abstract precisely because of the interweaving of domestic and international politics.

Paper short abstract:

China's increasing influence in international relatios by building strong infrastructural ties with many countries is one of the key elements in development studies today. Pakistan's Gwadar port is one of the main entrance for china to achieve it's ambitions through the belt and road initiative.

Paper long abstract:

China has become a major player in international sphere since the country’s unique growth in recent decades took place. The china’s communist party under the leadership of Xi Jinping, started to eliminate the so called “national humiliation age” between mid 19th and 20th century. Meanwhile, china sees itself as a rising power who wants a resurrection of national pride, others specially western democracies observe china as a country with predatory manners. The Belt and Road Initiative is the most controversial plan that had provoked the hesitancy among many countries about China’s actual tendency. This mammoth infrastructural plan starts from the east costs of china to the city of Duisburg in Germany into the west and it contains more than 60 countries. President Xi announced this initiative formally in 2013 and china is willing to complete it by 2049. However there is a lot of room for further surveys, this article will put it’s focus on china-Pakistan relations and the geopolitical importance of Pakistan’s Gwadar port in conducting the whole project. Pakistan as a developing country has a substantial petition for foreign investments and also engineering experts to build it’s vital infrastructures along the country. In this case Gwadar port will have an enormous impact on both china and Pakistan’s strategic role regionally and globally.

Key words: Belt and Road Initiative, Bilateral cooperation, Foreign investment, Gwadar port