Emerging Potentials: Times and Climes of the Belt and Road Initiative in Cambodia and Beyond

Abstract Drawing on STS, anthropological, and geographical studies of infrastructure and extended forms of media theory, this paper examines events and processes unfolding around the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia as an ontological experiment. The initiate is elicited as a massively distributed arrangement for making futures the contours of which no one can foresee with much precision. After sketching some conflicting diagnoses of the BRI, I turn to its implementation in Cambodia. I move between two coastal towns, Kampot, where its impacts are still barely felt, and Sihanoukville, which has been greatly disrupted. These settings facilitate characterization of the BRI’s scale-making capacities as consequent upon fuzzy relations between the infrastructure core and heterogeneous companions and parasites attaching to the initiative in search of untapped potentials opening at the edges. These complex developments provide the backdrop for a more speculative extrapolation of an infrastructural strategy oriented to emerging potentials. Over time, I suggest in conclusion, this strategy of maturation is likely to have dramatic social, environmental and climatic implications in Cambodia and far beyond.