Relational Sovereignty, Infrastructural Power and Volumetric Territoriality: China-Invested Special Economic Zones in Cambodia in the Context of Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

This research investigates China’s practices of relational sovereignty through Chinese-invested Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Cambodia in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawn upon insights from John Agnew’s effective sovereignty, Michael Mann’s infrastructural power, and Stuard Elden’s reading on territoriality, this study explores two major questions. Firstly, how extra-territories are demarcated, regulated, developed, and managed as SEZs, so as to allow collaborative utilisation by the ensemble of actors? What kinds of power networks and logistical techniques of control have been established for the transnational flows of capital, ideas, people and materials, and how is the evolvement of their power relations? Secondly, how to capture and understand the new geographies of the topologically networked power and their reach? In particular, how to understand the new technology of territorialisation that links up SEZs and infrastructures for the flows transcending jurisdictional borders?

Studies on special economic zones have insightfully unravelled their exceptionalness, in reference to the rest of the terrain within the same national territory, stressing features from special policies, and special land use, to special citizenships that amount to graduated sovereignty. While acknowledging the insightfulness of the graduated sovereignty thesis, I argue that a full understanding of SEZs is to move beyond treating it as an island carved out of its motherland, the overstress of which has the danger of developing flat epistemological narratives, whether it is divided, fragmented, or variegated. Instead, it is imperative to situate SEZs in the transnational networked flows of capital, policy ideas, and state and non-state actors, among others. For such endeavours, insights can be borrowed from the growing body of scholarship on effective territory, which argues for relational sovereignty along both spatial and organisational dimensions.

This study attempts to understand the production process of SEZs from a relational networked perspective by exploring the infrastructural power and the effectuated spatial reach. The territory is treated as both a technology for economic or political agenda and the outcome of negotiation of the ensemble of actors with respective interests. In this perspective, the SEZ, as part of the national territory, is embedded in the broader cross-border network of powers. It functions as both territorial arenas of political and economic activities and relational nodes for the transnational flow of human and non-human things. To control and secure the cross-border circulation of people and things at a distance, the technology of territorialisation is to be examined through the logic of calculation and corresponding mobility and reallocation of capital, people and goods, infrastructure building to channel the flows, and a volumetric territory that allow power stretch to different spheres of air, land, and water.

This research examined three China-invested SEZs (China-Cambodia Phnom Penh SEZ, Cambodia-China Investment and Development Pilot Zone, and Sihanoukville SEZ) in Cambodia through ethnography studies and archives studies. In this study, infrastructures include tangible and intangible ones, from institutional networks and diplomatic networks to professional networks, and the territorialisation of the policy idea of SEZs in Cambodia. The study unravels a dynamic evolvement of power relations and processes of territorialisation.

Date of Award	30 Aug 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Jun WANG (Supervisor)