Borderland Infrastructures

Abstract

Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia-the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania. Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities. The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas. It considers territorial borderlands at various scales (national as well as supra-and sub-national) and in various forms (land borders, maritime borders), but also presents research on social borderlands resulting from border-making that may not be territorially fixed, for example linguistic or diasporic communities.

Locating the Belt and Road Initiative's spatial trilectics

“…It thus requires moving beyond theorizing the New Silk Road as an exclusively static top‐down, state‐centric strategy originated in Beijing. Indeed, geographers have recently emphasized the need to also theorize the BRI as a flexible, relational process that depends on the spatial embeddedness of each project, local political and fiscal conditions, unstable local coalitions, and escalating social contestation (Apostolopoulou & Pant, 2022; Han & Webber, 2020; Joniak‐Lüthi, 2020; Murton & Lord, 2020; Ranganathan, 2015; Rippa, 2020; Rogelja, 2020). Yet, despite the major importance of these perspectives, a comprehensive analysis remains largely missing from BRI literature regarding the material geographies and political ecologies of the initiative and its grounded impacts on places, socionatures and livelihoods, including how these are differentiated along lines of class, gender, race, and ethnicity, as well as an exploration of how different social, economic, spatial, and environmental injustices are interlinked.…”

Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology

“…A similar argument could be made for studies of transport and energy infrastructure: the connecting tissue between centers of extraction, production, consumption, and distribution (cf. Bear, 2007;Dalakoglou, 2016;Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012;Heslop and Murton, 2021;Rippa, 2020). In their work on roads in Peru, Harvey and Knox (2015) argue that roads are sites where technicians have made 'new relations with materials as much as they ended up 'gridding' them ' (p. 94).…”

Sparks from the friction of terrain: Transport animals, borderlands, and the territorial imagination in China

“…This article undertakes a critical analysis of the representation of terrain and transport animals in Chinese political communication since the turn of the century, when the state initiated a grand project of development and control targeted at its western regions (Rippa, 2020). These decades have also seen an increasingly sophisticated campaign of "patriotic education", originally launched in 1991 in the wake of the Tiananmen protests, which involves emphasizing certain historical narratives to bolster the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) legitimacy (Wang, 2008).…”