This panel focuses on political practices and symbolic resources structuring economic and financial transactions among actors of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) politics. In particular, the panel questions the BRI political-socio-economic context which contributed to the emergence of transnational think tanks, media, social agents, and civil society organizations that are now daily reporting, commenting, and criticizing the Chinese public interventions in agro-industries, natural resources, and environmental policies in the global South, especially in African countries.

IPSA 2023, Buenos Aires: RC 51 Panel on Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Democracy: Normative Boundaries of a Global Economic Ambition

Argument

Democracy is an old idea and practice that evolved from the straightforward “rules of the citizens” to a list of socio-political objectives, including increased opportunities for deliberation and participation in the policymaking process. Applied beyond a mere norm, democracy has operated as a sociocultural political process, a way of doing, and a set of practices undergoing public evaluation and political monitoring. This panel focuses on political practices and symbolic resources structuring economic and financial transactions among actors of the BRI politics. In particular, the panel questions the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) political-socio-economic context which contributed to the emergence of transnational think tanks, media, social agents, and civil society organizations that are now daily reporting, commenting, and criticizing the Chinese public interventions in agro-industries, natural resources, and environmental policies in the global South, especially in African countries. It emphasizes the BRI as both an international economic project and a normative tool embedded in Xi Jinping’s, China’s president policy discourses. Comparatively, the China’s BRI domestic policy practices have monopolized a purely “made in China” policy design of BRI plans and programs thus minoring global democratic norms. How, thus, to understand and interpret such gaps and practices? To what extent do economic interests subclass humanistic policy methods? Can traditional theories of international economic relations be reconciled to understand better, analyze, and explain interactions between humanistic global policy economic discourses and realistic economic practices?

Topic Proposals

To answer these questions, we welcome papers that:

1. focus on democracy policy discourses and the BRI in various socio-economic contexts and examine the role of diasporas, transnational firms’ practices, transactions among political elites and political elites and citizens, the role of think tanks, civil organizations, and the media;
2. contextualize the study of BRI and social conflicts and rehabilitate the concepts of ‘hegemons,’ ‘boundaries’ in the current context of BRI;
3. highlight the intrinsic lanes between foreign policy and domestic economic politics of natural resources, trading diasporas, Chinese entrepreneurs, and transnational companies as actors of the Chinese foreign economic policy process.

How to apply

Interested authors should send an abstract through the IPSA website

Before January 18^th, 2023

Abstracts should include a title, the context, objectives and methodology used in the paper.

More information can also be found through the following link 

Scientific Committee

Convenor:

• Dr R. Mireille Manga Edimo, IRIC, University of Yaounde II (manmir2001@yahoo.com)

Chair:

• Dr R. Mireille Manga Edimo, IRIC, University of Yaounde II (manmir2001@yahoo.com)

Co-Chair :

• Julien Rajaoson, Departement de Science politique, Université de Lille (jrajaoson@hotmail.fr)