Economic Corridors
Economic corridors are geographically targeted development initiatives currently under construction on nearly every continent of the planet. While hard infrastructure such as transportation links, power generation, ports, and industrial zones contrive a spine, economic corridors are distinguished by accompanying "soft infrastructure" including business-friendly policies, regulations, and institutions to facilitate trade and investment. They feature prominently in foreign policy and development initiatives worldwide and have provided scaffolding for billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure investments. They will likely do the same for those spurred by the "Build Back Better World (B3W) Partnership" recently announced by the G7. Yet despite being around for over twenty years, relatively little has been written about economic corridors beyond the grey literature supported by multilateral development banks.
Notable exceptions to this dearth of conceptual engagement include those framing them as technologies of nationhood (in Malaysia), a form of licenced larceny (in Africa), tools of containment and enclosure (in China) , and neoliberal institutions and new frontiers of capital (in India). In an article recently published in the Review of International Studies I contribute to this literature on corridors and infrastructure by proposing we should understand economic corridors as an essentially extractivist paradigma process whereby capital draws on its multiple outsides as it depletes the social bases of wealth. This includes but is not limited to the plundering of the earth and biosphere, extending also to social dimensions of exploitation, such as the reorganisation of production and social relations that enable production.
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