Sovereign anxiety in Myanmar

An emotional geopolitics of China's Belt and Road Initiative

Bibliographic Data

ID8091765
AuthorsM Mostafanezhad (0000-0001-9819-5245, Department of Geography and Environment University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Honolulu Hawaii USA, corresponding author), Robert A Farnan (0000-0002-3364-7826, Stockholm Environment Institute, Department of Environment and Geography University of York York UK), Shona Loong (0009-0002-3466-8431, Department of Geography University of Zurich Zurich Switzerland)
Year2022
Volume48
Issue1
Pages132-148
Publication date2022-08-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12571
OpenAlexW4293230712
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited106

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

Anxiety · China · Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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