China's New Silk Road Project and the Mobilities Turn: Understanding Power Through Flows

China’s New Silk Road—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—is in the first instance an infrastructural mega-project, but works as a powerful political act. The mobilities geography, a theoretical framework assessing not only displacements of goods, people and ideas, but also their connected meanings, offers a suitable set of tools to investigate multiple layers of BRI, both from an infrastructural and from a relational perspective. Corporeal travel and good transportation, but also the establishment of information flows among Central Eurasian countries and with other world continents, and the establishment of multi-sectoral (and possibly asymmetrical) ties among regional economies. This contribution explores the advantages of understanding the BRI mega-project using the lenses of mobilities geography, i.e. exploring its ability to redefine the constellations of political power worldwide by means of an exchange of goods, people and ideas. The ultimate goal is to enlighten uncovered aspects of BRI and to set an agenda for future research.