Armenia and the Belt and Road Initiative

This book analyses the opportunities enabled for Armenia by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the framework of economic cooperation, policy diversification, social inclusion and regional cohesion.

Structured in five parts, the chapters outline the economic, geopolitical and legal agenda for Armenia, in order to formulate policy diversification and risk mitigation principles for participation in BRI projects. Experiences from Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus are included in the discussion. Offering international and Armenian perspectives on the advantages and disadvantages of participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, the book also suggests an alternative for Armenia: A deepening of its cooperation with democracies in the EU, and India.

A critically timed study, this book is an important addition to the literature of the South Caucasus region, the Indo-Pacific, and China studies. It will be of interest to policymakers and researchers in the field of international relations, security studies and area studies.

Sos Khachikyan is the Head of the Chair of Macroeconomics, and the Coordinator of the Centre for Digital Transformation and Data Analyses at the Armenian State University of Economics. He has more than 20 years of research experience in education, communication and technology-based management.

Jagannath P. Panda is the Head of the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs (SCSA-IPA) at the ISDP, Sweden. He is also a Professor at the Department of Regional and Global Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and a Senior Fellow at The Hague Center for Strategic Studies in the Netherlands. He is the Series Editor for Routledge Studies on Think Asia.

Ralph M. Wrobel is Professor of Economics and Coordinator of the East Asia Centre at the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau, Germany. His teaching and research areas are social market economy and emerging markets in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Asia.