Our stand at the 25th anniversary edition of the Long Night of the Sciences included something for all ages. Here’s a taste of what we presented at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on 28 June 2025. A map of the Belt and Road Initiative’s land and sea routes, designed by Iaroslav Boretskii (ZOiS), helped visitors visualise the
On 22 May 2025, Jana Hönke, professor and chair for Sociology in Africa at the University of Bayreuth, gave a fascinating talk based on the edited volume Africa’s Global Infrastructures: South–South Transformations in Practice. The talk examined Chinese projects within the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Africa. It asked how Chinese
As the second phase of De:link//Re:link will focus more on the implications of the BRI in Southeast Asian countries, members of our network took part in the HU’s Indonesian Studies Day on 9 May 2025. Prof. Dr. Claudia Derichs, whose research focuses on Indonesia, chaired a roundtable on the subject of China, Indonesia and the
The conference marking the end of our first phase of funding took place at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on 23 and 24 May 2024. Titled ‘Local Roads, Global Belts’, the event covered the wide spectrum of research on the BRI that we have produced since 2021. The programme consisted of panels concieved by the partners in
Since the De:link//Re:link research consortium formed in April 2021, there have been dramatic political changes in (Eur)Asia. Among them the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan later that year, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The expansion of the BRICS group of nations added to significant shifts in international relations. These
It is not only goods, financial capital or technologies that are being traded, negotiated and circulated along the China-led Belt and Road Initiative but also values, emotions and cultural practices. The latter are often decisive when imagining and establishing a transregional infrastructure of the scale of the BRI. This book explores connections and disconnections along
As China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) forges ahead, it continues to receive exponential media, societal and academic attention globally. Greece’s Piraeus harbor, Kenya’s SGR railway and Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port, amongst others, are often cited in many BRI discussions for diverse reasons. Reactions emanating from these discussions vary, just like the effects of the BRI projects themselves; from very successful outcomes of some; to ambivalent or detrimental effects of others; to comparative debates where BRI projects are compared to other initiatives; to reflections on debt distress amongst participant states. While engaging with notions of “de-linking” and “re-linking” for reflection and exploration of BRI effects and experiences – whereby “link” also stands for drawing from “local insights and new knowledges” – this symposium aims at analyzing current and future BRI perspectives across Asia, Africa and Europe.
Berlin has witnessed myriads of events that shaped global politics. One such event is the 1884-1885 Berlin Congo Conference which subdivided Africa amongst colonialists. China often strategically invokes Western colonialism to remind its Global South counterparts that while the West acted colonially -including colonising China- China is interested in cooperation, friendship, trade and development such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
On the 11th of December, we held a Silk Roads Workshop for teachers from various schools located within the state of Berlin. The workshop was titled The New Silk Road and it lasted from 1500 until 1800. Ulrike Cordier and John Njenga Karugia organized the workshop at the Institute for Asian and African Studies Institute at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The objectives of the Silk Roads Workshop were:
We were privileged to host our four international fellows this past Summer Semester and partly Winter Semester. During their stint in Berlin, we held a Silk Roads Roundtable session where we discussed various research approaches to study the Belt and Road Initiative and updated each other on our various research projects.
