Book publication: Global Perspectives on China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Amsterdam University Press has published a new LeidenAsiaCentre edited volume. Global Perspectives on China’s Belt and Road Initiative – Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity (edited by Florian Schneider) is now online available open access, or can be purchased as a hardcover.

“The year 2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regional networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in Global Perspectives on China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity provide both ‘big picture’ assessments of China’s role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.”

This edited volume is the culmination of the LeidenAsiaCentre project “Global Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative“, which started in 2019. On June 23, 2020, the findings of this research project were presented during an interactive online session. You can (re)watch the session here:

For more LeidenAsiaCentre work on the Belt and Road Initiative, see beltroadresearch.com.