The Belt and Road initiative as a discourse construction: A critical geopolitical analysis

This thesis approaches The Belt and Road Initiative, which has been initiated by Chinese government on 2013, within theoretical framework of critical geopolitics. Based on the critical geopolitical presumption that all geopolitical knowledge is indeed a discourse, this thesis analyzes discourses produced by Chinese government officials and academics who associated with Chinese universities. The thesis has three main arguments. Primarily, geopolitical knowledge is not objective and impartial, but discourses that serve the interests of certain actors. Hence, the knowledge produced by the Chinese government and academia to describe the Belt and Road Initiative is essentially contructed to serve the interests of China. Second of all, the current university system in China is in such a way that the state have influences on the academia, and therefore, the government and the academia affect each other in the knowledge production process. Third, the geopolitical discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative produced by Chinese authorities and academia is complementary. In other words while the Chinese government discursively constructs the Belt and Road Initiative, it uses the Chinese academia to naturalize its own discourse by influencing the knowledge production process of universities. This thesis aims to reveal how the Belt and Road Initiative is depicted as a geopolitical subject and what sort of relationship exists between power and academia by analyzing the discourses produced by Chinese official authorities and academics in the Chinese academy.