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.