Between the commons and the cosmos: The sacred politics of the BRI in Southeast Asia and beyond

• Main Author: WOODS, Orlando
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); Southeast Asia; commons; cosmos; sacred politics; infrastructure; Asian Studies; Infrastructure; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3616; https://doi.org/10.1080/23792949.2022.2081586
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper explores how political ecology can advance existing understandings of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its effects, and how the BRI can contribute to recent shifts in the study of political ecology. It argues that the idea of infrastructural overlap can sensitize discourse to the ways in which the materializations of the BRI, as a series of infrastructural megaprojects, intersect with other infrastructural formations, such as the environment and religion. By focusing on the effects of the BRI on resource- dependent communities located between the ‘commons’ and the ‘cosmos’ we can appreciate the sense of existential crisis that is triggered and exacerbated by China’s world-building agenda in Southeast Asia and beyond.