The issue introduces the symposium on the politics and spaces of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, locating the papers as concept explorations resting on case studies that contextualize and historicize Belt and Road Initiative. The first paper explores the historiography of one of the Belt and Road Initiative’s conditions of possibility, the Silk Road idea. The papers as a whole chart a burgeoning field of debate about the Belt and Road Initiative, most often operating at broad levels of geopolitical abstraction. The papers also encourage further investigations of the Belt and Road Initiative’s dynamics. Such work holds promise for wider theorizing of the interfaces between culture, economy, place, space, politics and infrastructure. The closing remarks sketch key research agendas in these domains in the light of the Belt and Road Initiative.
