This interlude pulls together themes of agency and hedging that run throughout many of the chapters in this volume. In it, Kuik develops a typology of host-country agency and addresses key questions: What explains variations of host-state agency? Why do some countries welcome foreign-backed infrastructure cooperation more than others? How do some smaller states hedge more effectively in infrastructure cooperation? It concludes, first, that infrastructure and connectivity cooperation – an increasingly salient aspect of international politics due chiefly to the growing US–China competition – are not just about big-power activism, but also about small-state agency. Second, hedging is increasingly prevalent in international cooperation, though remains understudied. And third, it reveals that while power competition at global and regional levels provides the space and leverage for smaller states to hedge, exactly how individual states engage is conditioned by domestic attributes, most notably elite legitimation and internal resilience, thus pointing to the importance of analysis at multiple scales.
This interlude considers the conditions under which a Sino-centric capitalist class is emerging. It proposes a schema for analysing Sino-centric class formation – along economic, political, and ideological lines – and introduces cases in Venezuela, Serbia, and New Zealand. However, despite China’s growing global political economic power, there is scant evidence of a Sino-centric transnational capitalist class operating as a class-for-itself. This, the chapter suggests for now substantially limits China’s ability to become a global hegemon anchoring a distinctively Chinese-centred system of capital accumulation. It concludes by asking how the global political economy may fragment or align along particular US- or Sino-centric lines.
The introduction sets the stage of US–China rivalry and introduces the concept of the infrastructure state. As the chapters in this volume show, the infrastructure state pursues spatial objectives which have necessitated institutional reform or extensive state restructuring. The infrastructure state exhibits significant variation from place to place but, in all cases, it seeks to address longstanding developmental challenges through the enhancement of connectivity. The concept of the infrastructure state, thus, shines a light on the effects of US–China rivalry at multiple scales while it also underscores that decisions by actors in the Global South are influenced by local infrastructural histories and political economic dynamics. Simply, local-level politics are shaped by and shape geopolitical competition.
This chapter argues that district-level bureaucrats participate in mediating different visions of infrastructure held by the many actors to which they have responsibility, ranging from local village assemblies to international contractors and state agencies. These acts of mediation are animated by the specific challenges and tensions that arise with the implementation of new infrastructure projects within their jurisdictions. As mediators, bureaucrats engage in various acts of negotiation that intervene in the original ‘blueprints’ of infrastructure projects and produce adapted infrastructures and spaces. Thus, it explores how district-level bureaucrats play an integral role in East Africa’s infrastructure scramble and show that their offices are everyday spaces in which global economic and geopolitical competition is negotiated.
This chapter offers two contributions: it, first, problematizes new Cold War narratives and, second, suggests focusing on the ways in which infrastructure investments align with host state interests and prompt internal restructuring. By contextualizing the processes that are discussed in faraway offices in Washington and Beijing, it shows that bipolar geopolitical rhetoric does not aptly capture the Lao infrastructural experience. Instead, it is characterized by an array of actors and interests, which the Lao government has balanced since well before the BRI. While geopolitical tension has undoubtedly intensified, bipolar rivalry is scarcely visible despite recent US overtures. Rather, other bilateral relations such as those with Vietnam, Japan, as well as Russia, are pivotal. They are not only investing in and building much of Laos’s infrastructure, but they also have deep relations, and their capital and projects have become tools for the Lao government to balance Chinese influence. With the BRI, national development goals are not kowtowing to Chinese demands, but rather incorporate problems and agendas that have been on the table much longer than the BRI. The key question that arises across Lao government ministries is how to juggle and benefit from a deluge of projects and investment capital, and the Lao government has demonstrated an aptitude for successfully manoeuvring between various countries, donors, and international organizations who rush to offer aid or development finance and secure influence.
Since independence in 1991, Kazakhstan’s role in Central Asia and the world has evolved as it became a regional pivot, and central to the interests of the US and China. The Kazakhstani government has worked closely with the US since the 1990s on security issues. While China also has security interests in Kazakhstan, its primary interest has been economic, as it views Kazakhstan as a source of natural resources and a transit route. American and Chinese foreign policies towards Kazakhstan were compatible, and sometimes even complementary, until recently when their relationship has become competitive, particularly in the field of infrastructure construction. However, with the BRI and the US keen to expand economic ties with Kazakhstan, the country has become central to geopolitical-economic competition. This has offered the Kazakh government an opportunity to leverage the country’s strategic location as a pivot at the crossroads of Eurasia. By hedging between the US and China, Kazakhstan has secured support for its spatial objectives, which are centred around the idea that Kazakhstan become a central hub for goods transportation and engine of economic growth for the region. centrality to the US–China rivalry affords it agency, but in some instances, this has undermined the realization of its spatial objectives.
This chapter is about outer space infrastructures in Eurasia in the overlapping contexts of the BRI, the final years of the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, and diverse approaches to development within and among Central Eurasian states. These contexts are situated within multiple histories: the footprint of Soviet-era space infrastructure, shifts in global extractive politics, and the more recent increase of public and private actors using outer space-based and space-linked technologies for a variety of purposes. This chapter probes several contexts in Central Eurasia to complexify the actors, interests, and institutions involved in this immense and varied region. Through three brief case studies of space activities in Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, the chapter decenters the roles of ‘Great Power’ or ‘New Cold War’ politics. It makes two analytical moves – to put grandiose discourses in their place, while also bringing the domain of outer space more centrally into discussions on infrastructure, investment flows, development, and security – enabling greater clarity on the dynamics unfolding across the diverse regions of Central Eurasia, in subterranean, surface, and orbital spaces. It concludes that far from being bipolar, infrastructural competition comprises dozens of parties working, together as well as independently, on a host of different initiatives.
This chapter challenges ‘chessboard’ interpretations of infrastructural geopolitics in a realm often assumed to be the sole purview of great powers: nuclear energy. More specifically, it analyses how Namibian actors have employed radioactive strategies – a term used here to refer to the tactics through which actors use the geopolitical significance of nuclear infrastructures to advance their spatial objectives – to pursue their own spatial-political objectives in the context of nuclear geopolitics and uranium mining. It does so across temporalities ranging from German colonialism to apartheid South Africa’s quest for ‘the bomb’ and the Cold War to the war on climate change. The chapter explains how the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), Namibia’s liberation-movement-turned-ruling-party, transformed nuclear infrastructures from symbols of colonial and apartheid exploitation into core components of its quest for state-led extractive development. It begins with an overview of the colonial and apartheid origins of Namibian uranium before embarking on a more detailed analysis of SWAPO’s radioactive strategies during the Cold War, the US-led War on Terror, and, finally, the current moment of US–China rivalry. It concludes with a discussion of how attending to historical and geographic contexts and host country agency can shed new light on infrastructural geopolitics across multiple scales.
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 traces the established narrative of infrastructure development in Kyrgyzstan as first dominated by the Soviet Union, followed by the US through international development banks in the 1990s, and most recently by China. It complicates this narrative by diversifying scales of analysis and examining who engages in infrastructure planning and construction, thereby recognizing a multitude of actors and non-linear trajectories development trajectories. Through on-the-ground road ethnography and asphalt archaeology, the authors show the centrality of local politics and perception. They also consider debt and whether it creates dependencies or mutuality.
