Routledge Handbook of China's Belt and Road Initiative in Eurasia

This handbook critically analyses and examines the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) geostrategy in Eurasia. Over the last decade, the BRI contributed to China becoming an economic and political superpower, but the Russo–Ukrainian War brought seismic geopolitical and geoeconomic impacts and a new struggle between great powers. Covering the impact of the BRI and the positions of other great, middle, and small powers, the ten parts explain the geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics along the Silk Road Economic Belt’s six major economic corridors, implementing case studies on Europe, South Caucasus, Central Asia, Russian Far East, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.

Expert scholars from East, West, North, and South engage with BRI concepts to create a book that will be of interest to policymakers, businesspeople, scholars, and students of area studies, cybersecurity and digitalisation, economics, security studies, the politics of international trade, foreign policy, global governance, and international organisations.

Mher D. Sahakyan is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He is the director of the China–Eurasia Council for Political and Strategic Research in Armenia and the founder of the Eurasian Research on Modern China and Eurasia conference. Mher was an AsiaGlobal Fellow at the Asia Global Institute of the University of Hong Kong (2020/2021 and 2022). He was a 2024 LEWI Visiting Fellow at the David C. Lam Institute for East–West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. Mher holds a doctorate in international relations from China’s Nanjing University. He is the Editor of Routledge Handbook of Chinese and Eurasian International Relations, China and Eurasian Powers in Multipolar World Order 2.0: Security, Diplomacy, Economy and Cybersecurity, and the co‑editor of China and Eurasia: Rethinking Cooperation and Contradictions in the Era of Changing World Order, published by Routledge in 2024, 2023, and 2021.

Kevin Lo is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and Acting Director of the David C. Lam Institute for East–West Studies of Hong Kong Baptist University. He earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Melbourne. He is an Editor‑in‑Chief of the Journal of Asian Energy Studies, an international peer‑reviewed journal dedicated to interdisciplinary research on all aspects of energy studies in Asia. He has won several major competitive grants from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong and has published in many leading journals, including Global Environmental Change, Political Geography, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Energy Policy, Energy for Sustainable Development, Environmental Science & Policy, Cities, Habitat International, and Journal of Rural Studies.