Visual Analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative: The Securing of a Regional Geopolitical Order, China’s Identity, and Infrastructure Development Narratives.

The politics of narrative competition in Central Asia, with the goal to reinforce and set the agenda about infrastructural development, has intensified. In addition to Russia’s longstanding role to influence the discursive environment of infrastructural development in Central Asia, China has substantially enforced its power to project new narratives about this pivotal issue. Using solidarity and economic narratives, i.e. horizontal cooperation, economic partnerships, and win-win outcomes, rising powers’ adjoining aim is to secure regional geopolitics. These narrative scripts aim to legitimize existing and prospective policies as well as to achieve a positive perception of the political actors in the region. Strategic narratives on infrastructural development then aligns narratives of the Self (state actors) with narratives of a desirable regional order. This article evaluates, how and why, infrastructural development narratives secure. regional geopolitics, using the case of Russia and China competing in Central Asia in a post-Cold War order. It builds on the concept of ontological security, in which states seek consistent concepts of the Self by narrativizing foreign policy actions in the area of infrastructural development. The effectiveness of narrative scriptwriting depends on a symbiosis of rhetoric and actual policy-processes as well as the coherency and strength of the narrative itself. Using a narrative analysis, this article identifies and evaluates the formation of infrastructural development narratives in Russia’s and China’s regional communication for the securing of regional geopolitics.