Connections as a question.

The silk roads were never only routes. They joined pathways, travellers, institutions and ideas, and they endured only because movement and translation repeatedly remade them. Our research network, The Digital Silk Roads and Beyond, takes this coupling as its object. Rather than treating the Digital Silk Road as a coherent policy object or a unidirectional projection of Chinese power, we approach digital silk roads as plural, contested and unfinished formations.

Much of the existing scholarship on the Digital Silk Road reduces it to cables, data centres and e-commerce corridors, a reading that mirrors the policy category it studies. We treat the digital silk roads instead as a question. How do digital infrastructures, the mobility of people and products, and the ideas that travel through these connections together produce territory, and what does this mean for sovereignty, labour and memory across the roads the Belt and Road Initiative continues to extend? The network's geography follows that extension rather than fixing it in advance. Asia and Africa are its initial focus, not its boundary.

Three lines of inquiry

The network develops this problem through three lines of inquiry.

Digital infrastructures

The first line examines digital infrastructures as sites of geopolitical and geoeconomic struggle. It follows terrestrial and undersea cables, satellites, semiconductors, data centres, cloud systems, platforms, payment networks, logistics, energy supplies and special economic zones. It asks who controls hubs and chokepoints; how states and firms convert network centrality into market power, surveillance or coercion; and how economic security, strategic autonomy, industrial policy, export controls, de-risking and decoupling reorganise transregional corridors. This line brings debates over weaponised interdependence, the second Cold War, infrastructure states, platform capitalism, cloud empires and digital colonialism into contact with the work of financing, building, standardising and maintaining systems. Are the Digital Silk Roads instruments of Chinese state and imperial expansion, alternatives to an order centred on the United States, negotiated development projects, or fragmented arrangements sustained through poly-alignment and docking? Under what conditions does interdependence generate domination, dependency, autonomy or leverage?

Mobility of people and products

The second line examines the mobility of people and products, including the labour, relationships and material practices through which movement becomes possible. It follows migrants, diasporas, traders, platform and logistics workers, technology professionals and digital nomads, alongside commodities, consumer goods, devices, components and cultural objects. It asks how the movement of people and things becomes connected through trade, production, distribution, use and repair. Work on special economic zones highlights how flows of people, techniques and products become situated in places through brokers and institutional arrangements. Research on mobile phone and battery entrepreneurs between China and Kenya shows how testing, certification and everyday technical work enable products to circulate across different regulatory systems.

This line asks how passports, visas, customs procedures, platforms, digital identity systems, tax regimes and product certification enable, sort or interrupt movement. How do class, race, gender, citizenship and labour position produce unequal mobility? Who bears the work and costs of transporting, translating, testing, maintaining and repairing things? Engaging debates on mobility regimes, flexible citizenship, differential inclusion, migration infrastructure, platform labour, diaspora diplomacy, long-distance nationalism, transnational repression and brokerage in digital markets, it examines how mobile networks carry expertise, remittances, narratives and political claims. It asks when these circulations consolidate state or corporate power and when they enable actors to alter the terms of connection.

Cultural, standards and technology diplomacy

The third line examines cultural, standards and technology diplomacy through the circulation of ideas and the authority they acquire. Its objects range from fiction, music, television drama, games, visual culture, memories and digital heritage to technological visions, standards, regulations, policy templates and models such as special economic zones. It brings soft power and sharp power, strategic narratives, public and cultural diplomacy, heritage diplomacy, technology and standards diplomacy, norm diffusion, regulatory power, civilisational politics, cultural imperialism and data colonialism into a common inquiry. It asks how platforms, intellectual property, language, metadata, algorithms and standards bodies determine whose stories and systems travel and become authoritative; when cultural popularity becomes political influence; when standards lock in markets or export models of governance; and how audiences and communities translate, refuse or repurpose what circulates. Digital heritage sharpens these questions: who authorises the past, controls archives and cultural data, and makes memory serve diplomacy, sovereignty or counterclaims?

A shared inquiry

Together, the three lines allow the network to stage competing diagnoses of contemporary world order. For Farrell and Newman, network centrality enables weaponised interdependence; Schindler and colleagues read the second Cold War as a struggle for centrality across infrastructure, digital, production and financial networks. Cloud empire and digital colonialism arguments foreground corporate command and extraction, whereas networked sovereignty approaches treat the state and sovereign capacity as effects of structuring connectivity. Diaspora diplomacy, sovereignty from below and everyday diplomacy reveal how mobile actors, communities and technical labour mediate, contest or redirect these projects. The network does not select one diagnosis in advance. It asks what each explains, at which scale and in which places; how these processes combine; and what each misses when African and Asian actors are treated merely as recipients. At their intersection, the Digital Silk Roads may be corridors of accumulation and coercion, arenas of great-power rivalry, vehicles of cultural and technical diplomacy, or sites of alternative ordering. Diplomacy spans interstate bargaining as well as cultural, heritage, technology, standards, diaspora and everyday practices. Sovereignty becomes an empirical question of who can set the terms of connection, command chokepoints, standardise, classify, extract, authorise memory, mobilise people and interrupt circulation.

This framing addresses the separation between IR and IPE accounts of strategic rivalry and political economy, on the one hand, and geographical, sociological and cultural research on situated practices, on the other. Neither scale is sufficient by itself. We are starting with geographers, communication studies scholars and scholars in international relations and international political economy. The network welcomes contributions from science and technology studies, labour and migration studies, heritage studies and area studies. It supports collaboration among institutions across the global South and with partners elsewhere, while treating African, Southeast Asian and other Asian sites as sources of theory, comparison and critique. Where appropriate, its conversations will also include archivists, curators, technicians, cultural practitioners and community knowledge holders.

Research exchange and collaboration

The network provides a platform for sustained research exchange, comparative inquiry and collaborative production across the three lines. It will begin with online seminars hosted by coordinating members in turn, jointly organised conference sessions and a founding workshop. These exchanges will support the sharing of research, methods, contacts and field knowledge, as well as writing groups, comparative projects, joint publications and collaborative funding proposals. Our longer term vision is a sustained research community in which scholarship grounded in the places studied shapes how digital connections and their political consequences are understood.

Participation

We welcome scholars at all career stages, as well as practitioners, archivists, curators, technologists and community researchers whose work engages one or more of these concerns. We particularly encourage participation from colleagues based in Africa and Asia and from institutions and communities that remain underrepresented in international research networks. Participants may present research, join discussions, contribute comparative material, develop collaborative writing or propose new activities. We invite those who share these interests to help shape the network's questions, collaborations and future directions.