The sacred dimensions of the BRI's infrastructural commons

Abstract

Whilst the idea of infrastructure has animated scholarship for the past 20 years at least, there remains a need for more expansive understandings of what infrastructure is, and what it can be. The speed, scale, and material disruptiveness with which many of the infrastructural megaprojects that constitute China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been developed both underpin and validate this need. The effects of the BRI are both manifold and diffuse, and all of them expose situations of infrastructural complexity. We see the BRI as an infrastructural layer that comes into contact, competition, and collision with pre-existing infrastructural formations. It is an infrastructural vortex that causes once shared resources and public or common goods to become infrastructuralized in ways that bring about the (re)negotiation of meaning and value. These processes are acutely felt in South and Southeast Asia, where sedimented patterns of religion and belief shape the ways in which the BRI is engaged with and understood. Surprisingly, the sacred dimensions of these infrastructural commons remain unstudied, despite there being evidence to suggest that it is the transformative power of the sacred, rather than of secular modernity, that shapes and structures everyday lives. In this vein, the articles that constitute this special issue explore the sacred dimensions of the BRI's infrastructural commons through a series of case studies from South and Southeast Asia.