Sovereign anxiety in Myanmar: An emotional geopolitics of China's Belt and Road Initiative

被引:13
作者
Mostafanezhad, Mary [1 ]
Farnan, Robert A. [2 ]
Loong, Shona [3 ]
机构
[1] Univ Hawaii Manoa, Dept Geog & Environm, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA
[2] Univ York, Stockholm Environm Inst, Dept Environm & Geog, York, N Yorkshire, England
[3] Univ Zurich, Dept Geog, Zurich, Switzerland
基金
英国科研创新办公室;
关键词
Belt and Road Initiative; emotional geopolitics; infrastructure; Myanmar; sovereign anxiety; FEAR; STATE; POLITICS; BURMA; INVESTMENTS; NATIONALISM; DISCOURSES; ENCOUNTER; CONFLICT; VIOLENCE;
D O I
10.1111/tran.12571
中图分类号
P9 [自然地理学]; K9 [地理];
学科分类号
0705 ; 070501 ;
摘要
Geographers have increasingly attended to the role of emotion in geopolitical encounters and the geopolitics of cross-border infrastructure projects. While scholars have theorised fear as an emotion produced by elite geopolitical discourses and encounters between bodies, we know much less about how infrastructure's materialities provoke fear and anxiety. Furthermore, key distinctions between anxiety - or a psychological state of insecurity and unease - and fear, which is attached to a specific target object, are still not fully understood. Focused on the uncertainties over China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), we develop the concept of sovereign anxiety - a generalised condition of unease over the security of one's political community - to account for how the BRI generates not only the hard materials of infrastructure (e.g., roads, dams and pipelines), but also the social practices of affect and emotion. Sovereign anxiety, we argue, is heightened by the absence of transparency over China's infrastructure investments in Myanmar. In this paper, we trace how sovereign anxiety is variously experienced and grounded in residents' observations, personal biographies, social histories, and sense of community belonging. We also identify three themes by which fears of the BRI are articulated: relations, roads, and resources. This article contributes an emotional geopolitics perspective to grounded studies of the BRI, while also demonstrating the geopolitical significance of attending to the emotional lives of infrastructure in relation to the BRI and beyond.
引用
收藏
页码:132 / 148
页数:17
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