Locating the Belt and Road Initiative's spatial trilectics

Abstract

In this paper, we survey the expanding body of literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Chinese and Anglophone geography, and locate the main lines of development. The emerging scholarship approaches the BRI as a spatial discourse and examines the production of geographical reasoning in statecraft. It also links up with studies of the BRI as both a material project and an everyday experience. We argue that it is in this combined understanding of BRI's multiple registers, as discourse, project, and experience, that a trilectical approach for future geographical engagement can be identified as the BRI edges to its second decade.