The globalisation of the Silk Road : Sino-Latin American and Caribbean relations and the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

This work investigates the normative implications of the People’s Republic of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on Latin American and Caribbean conceptions of order understood as regional normative fabric. It advances a problematisation and critique of the status quo of English School research, especially also regarding its regional and discursive turns, with respect to the application of ex-ante theorised lists of institutions as a theoretical bias or filter. The solution offered in this work is a theoretical-methodological framework following the guidelines of constructivist Grounded Theory and drawing on Wittgensteinian thought as well as on (cognitive) linguistics in order to emphasise the meaning-in-use in the thoughts and ideas of statespersons expressed in their discourse. The framework builds on the Englisch School and Norm Studies as scholarly preconceptions and sensitising concepts. The purpose of this work is to provide, by way of applying the grounded theoretical-methodological framework, new grounded understandings of (regional) conceptions of order, as context-dependant normative fabrics, and answering the question of what happens when normative fabrics of different context and origin meet. The meeting of normative fabrics is demonstrated on the example of the People’s Republic of China and CELAC, Argentina, and Colombia respectively in comparative analyses. The work makes four main contributions to IR: One, the development and demonstration of a grounded theoretical-methodological framework for the study of normative fabrics. Two, the (co-)construction of new grounded understandings of Latin America and the Caribbean as a one region and its normative fabric as woven by CELAC. Three, the diversification of BRI Studies both thematically and geographically – emphasising the ideational dimension rather than the material one and focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean as an understudied region within that field. Four, shedding light on the clearly normative implications of the initiative in Latin America and the Caribbean.