ICS Seminar Series

Belt and Road foregrounds ideas of connectivity, exchange and networks, using imagined histories of the Silk Roads - overland and maritime - to establish a narrative of Eurasian ‘shared Silk Road heritage’. The talk focuses on this new imagining of Eurasia through the Silk Roads, and the implications such a heritage of regionalism, trade and exchange holds in building foundations for contemporary neoliberal trade and regional security practices. Incorporating 4 billion people and 60 countries, Belt and Road has been described as ‘the most significant and far-reaching initiative that China has ever put forward’; promising to transform the political, economic and cultural landscapes of Eurasia and Africa over the coming decades. In this context, we are seeing long-standing ideas about culture and history rooted in national and ethnic pasts being displaced by a language of routes and cross-border connectivities. To examine such shifts the talk uses the concept of heritage diplomacy. In so doing, it foregrounds the ‘other half’ of the politics of heritage; focusing less on contestation and destruction, in favour of a critical understanding of cooperation, alignment and collaboration.