Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in northern Pakistan, this paper examines how media and public discourse about the Belt and Road Initiative as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, produces everyday geopolitics through hospitality and speculative practices oriented toward the future.

Paper long abstract

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a flagship component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), envisioned as a network of transport, energy, and digital infrastructures linking western China to the Arabian Sea. In Pakistan’s northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan—a constitutionally liminal territory shaped by unresolved sovereignty claims—CPEC has generated powerful future-oriented imaginaries well before many projects have materially arrived. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among family-run guest houses, upscale resorts, freelancers, artists, and state-affiliated communication authorities, this paper approaches tourism infrastructure as a site of everyday geopolitics. It traces how roads, internet connectivity, booking platforms, surveillance technologies, and architectural aesthetics become tools through which residents anticipate increased tourist influxes, assert legitimacy, and recalibrate their relationships to the Pakistani state, China, and global publics.

I argue that tourism functions as an infrastructural imaginary: a domain where uninterrupted electricity, reliable internet, hygiene standards, CCTV surveillance, and digital visibility operate as signs of readiness for participation in global circuits of ongoing and future mobility. These infrastructures generate affective responses—hope, anxiety, aspiration, and scepticism—as people invest in futures framed by CPEC discourses of connectivity and development. At the same time, platforms such as Booking.com, Instagram, and Google Reviews expose local actors to uneven regimes of visibility and accountability, producing new forms of regulation beyond the state.

By foregrounding tourism infrastructure as everyday geopolitics, this paper shows how global geopolitical projects are lived in advance of their completion, shaping social relations, moral claims, and future-making in Gilgit Baltistan.