"Silk Road here we come": infrastructural myths, post-disaster politics, and the shifting urban geographies of Nepal
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Apostolopoulou, Elia
Pant, Hitesh
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In this paper, we explain how China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) drives urban transformation in Nepal reconfiguring geopolitical and geoeconomic relations and remaking the sociopolitical, cultural and material fabric of hitherto peripheral spaces. Given that BRI infrastructures materialize in parallel with Chinese-funded reconstruction projects, we pay attention to the role of post-disaster politics to unravel how ongoing urban transformation does not only affect the present and the future but also people's histories and post-disaster memories by treating places of (re)building as empty of previous life and history. By drawing on 16 months of fieldwork, we show that despite the evident role of the BRI as an agent of urban transformation, the materialization of most BRI projects depends on geopolitical rivalries, negotiations, unstable local coalitions and escalating social contestation. We conclude that in the post-disaster era, BRI projects have become new vehicles towards Naya [new] Nepal, along with many other infrastructural myths that preceded the country's modern history. Nonetheless, the Naya urban Nepal that is emerging from the ruins of the past is contested and uncertain, a far cry from the days of the Panchayat regime and the civil war, when such gargantuan projects were rarely challenged by Nepali people. This is the unique trajectory of Silk Road urbanization in Nepal: an ultimate path to reach a long due rural-to-urban transition that is inextricably linked with decades of infrastructural violence and precarity and strongly shaped by people's struggles against the unequal geographies of BRI-driven urban transformation.
Date Issued
2022-10-01
Date Acceptance
2022-06-22
Citation
Political Geography, 2022, 98
ISSN
0962-6298
Publisher
Elsevier
Journal / Book Title
Political Geography
Volume
98
Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
License URL
Subjects
BELT
ECONOMY
Geography
Government & Law
Political Science
POWER
Social Sciences
STATE FORMATION
VIOLENCE
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
102704
Date Publish Online
2022-07-02