The conclusion first summarizes the key contributions of the volume. Contemporary great power rivalry has far-reaching consequences for people and places worldwide, and it increasingly serves as a reference point for issues that were unrelated until recently. As chapters in this volume show, this competition involves a host of middle and regional powers as well as international institutions, while affording third states and localities agency. The chapter questions whether there is scope for more emancipatory politics to take shape among a bloc of non-aligned states capable of influencing the international order, and concludes by exploring the possibility of the emergence of 21st-century Third Worldism.
This chapter discusses how elites in the Duterte administration (2016 onwards) have carved out new state spaces amid intensified US–China geostrategic competition and the expansion of the BRI in the Philippines. While observers argue that Duterte represents a distinct ‘pro-China’ faction, this chapter instead suggests that the country’s recent shifts in foreign economic policy are the result of competing political, economic, and military coalitions that collectively underpin a convoluted geopolitical approach towards US and China. Beyond Duterte’s immediate role, this account draws attention to a broader constellation of actors and conflicts behind the country’s management of the BRI and geopolitics in general. In the context of US–China competition, Philippine elites are pursuing longstanding political, economic, and spatial objectives through state restructuring. The first case in the chapter illustrates how Philippine economic managers shifted their infrastructure strategy from a market-oriented approach leaning heavily on public–private partnerships (PPPs) to a hybridized usage of PPPs and foreign funding. The second case shows that elites within the Philippine military, particularly the Coast Guard, leveraged Duterte’s (d)alliance with China to expand their jurisdiction and capacity. In sum, the chapter illustrates that host states restructure in the context of US–China competition in accordance with the interests of elite coalitions, illustrating the heterogeneity of powers and interests in the host country.
This chapter examines Hungary’s attempt to leverage its strategic position as a member of the EU and its geography on the bloc’s eastern periphery. While Hungary is firmly rooted in the EU and benefits from integration in European – mainly German – production networks, the right-wing Orbán government that came to power in 2010 turned to China in pursuit of domestic and regional political and spatial objectives. This orientation was precipitated by the hope that ties with Beijing would foster Chinese investment and international trade. This chapter contextualizes Hungary’s ‘eastward turn’ as a reversal of the resolute faith in Western Europe, and ‘the West’ in general, that characterized Hungarian politics since the end of the Cold War. This faith was severely tested in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and, in this context, the Hungarian government seized on integration with China’s fast-growing economy as the answer to persistently sluggish growth and the EU’s bureaucratic inertia. However, this chapter shows that this strategy’s economic dividends have largely failed to materialize, while its infrastructural promise has also lagged far below expectations. As a result, domestic and foreign criticism of Hungary’s relations with China has grown louder in recent years, and relations with China are currently becoming a central issue in Hungarian domestic politics.
Tensions between the US and China have escalated as both powers seek to draw countries into their respective political and economic orbits by financing and constructing infrastructure. Wide-ranging and even-handed, this book offers a fresh interpretation of the territorial logic of US-China rivalry, and explores what it means for countries across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. The chapters demonstrate that many countries navigate the global infrastructure boom by articulating novel spatial objectives and implementing political and economic reforms. By focusing on people and places worldwide, this book broadens perspectives on the US-China rivalry beyond bipolarity, and it is an essential guide to 21st century politics.
Tensions between the US and China have escalated as both powers seek to draw countries into their respective political and economic orbits by financing and constructing infrastructure. Wide-ranging and even-handed, this book offers a fresh interpretation of the territorial logic of US-China rivalry, and explores what it means for countries across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. The chapters demonstrate that many countries navigate the global infrastructure boom by articulating novel spatial objectives and implementing political and economic reforms. By focusing on people and places worldwide, this book broadens perspectives on the US-China rivalry beyond bipolarity, and it is an essential guide to 21st century politics.
This chapter examines how Nepal is seeking to enhance its trans-Himalayan connectivity with China to reduce its dependence on India. This case speaks to geopolitics because the US is supporting Indian efforts to orient the Nepali economy away from China through large-scale infrastructure investments. The chapter asks: in what ways is competition in infrastructure development becoming a key domain of geopolitics and geoeconomics on the Himalayan landscape, and how has the Nepali state, as an ‘infrastructure state’ in the sense developed in this volume, leveraged the opportunity to mobilize foreign capital for infrastructure projects serving national interests. It demonstrates that like many countries within the ambit of BRI and other regimes of infrastructure-led development, Nepal is refashioning itself as an infrastructure state – driving development priorities with large infrastructure and imagining that not only economic growth but also that poverty alleviation and empowerment will follow. Thus, infrastructure competition among geopolitical powers in the Himalaya unwittingly creates opportunities for assertion of agency and autonomy by small states, while also revealing the limits of hegemony, and indeed the vulnerability of the major geopolitical powers.
This chapter examines the changing degrees of influence of the US and China in Indonesia by considering the influence of a third power, Japan. It argues that Indonesia is hedging against the US–China strategic competition, leveraging Japanese capital to attain greater benefits in the negotiations of Chinese capital and carefully detach Indonesia from US influence. First, through the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed railway, the chapter shows how Indonesia attained a better deal from China by leveraging Japan’s initial proposal. Second, it illustrates that the government has consistently followed Japan’s position to hedge against the US-led Freedom of Navigation Operations. Both cases illuminate how Indonesia has relied on Japan’s influence to carve out new state spaces in response to US–China strategic competition. This chapter ultimately demonstrates that, although US–China competition establishes parameters of action for other states, it does not determine outcomes. Jakarta’s project-specific hedging strategies in the context of the US–China rivalry demonstrate that it enjoys a measure of agency that can be translated into the achievement of spatial objectives.
Tensions between the US and China have escalated as both powers seek to draw countries into their respective political and economic orbits by financing and constructing infrastructure. Wide-ranging and even-handed, this book offers a fresh interpretation of the territorial logic of US-China rivalry, and explores what it means for countries across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. The chapters demonstrate that many countries navigate the global infrastructure boom by articulating novel spatial objectives and implementing political and economic reforms. By focusing on people and places worldwide, this book broadens perspectives on the US-China rivalry beyond bipolarity, and it is an essential guide to 21st century politics.
Through investments in large-scale connective infrastructures in Kenya since 2009, this chapter shows how megaprojects emerge from national and regional development visions, while simultaneously functioning as material and symbolic articulations of geopolitical influence – as well as their contestation – within transcontinental inter-state arrangements. Their importance on a local and global scale enables them to represent what we call symbolic geopolitical architectures of development, which are advanced through China’s Belt and Road Initiative but also pursued because of US anxiety to counter Chinese influence. It demonstrates how, despite complementary Kenyan, African, and Chinese infrastructural visions, such developments encounter contestation at multiple levels. This includes politicized public attempts to confront China’s global influence, most prominently by US actors, even if the material effects of such strategies are yet to materialize in Kenya. The chapter shows that megaprojects are symbolic geopolitical architectures through which citizens, non-citizens, and even representatives of foreign states narrate their anxieties. This demonstrates how Kenya’s infrastructure development functions as a symbolic geopolitical field in which China and the US are set to compete in the future. Actual infrastructures, therefore, unfold through complex multiscalar politics, registered by the national critiques of megaprojects and the emerging discursive responses from the US that map onto and are interrelated with these public debates. Ultimately infrastructure in Kenya is not only the articulation of competition between global powers, but it is also shaped by a domestic politics directed by ordinary citizens.
China has loomed large in Ecuador during both the post-neoliberal turn under Rafael Correa (2007–17) and the return to neoliberalism under his successor Lenín Moreno (2017–). The China-powered commodity boom proved crucial in providing Correa the economic wherewithal to break with local business elites and their international allies. However, the direct involvement of Chinese state capital had other important but contradictory effects in shaping correísmo. As the country turned away from traditional sources of investment, Chinese lenders and investors sustained a deepening of the extractivism on which Correa’s redistributive policies rested. Conversely, some Chinese-built and -financed projects engendered ambitious attempts to shift towards a model more in line with the official ideology of buen vivir (‘good living’ – including constitutionally enshrined rights of nature). This article highlights two such ventures: the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam, meant to substantially reduce Ecuador’s fossil fuel dependence; and the Yachay City of Knowledge, aimed at developing a ‘biopolis’ economy. Moreno’s presidency has seen a neoliberal backlash and the return of both the International Monetary Fund and local capitalists to political influence. Meanwhile, alleged corruption surrounding Chinese projects has become a tool in Moreno’s efforts to marginalize key figures from the previous administration.
