Dr. Hasan Karrar talk available to view online

On November 17, 2022, we hosted Dr. Hasan Karrar from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in an online event titled BRI on the Ground: Observations from an early adapter state.

The recording of this event is now available to be viewed online hereand below.

In his lecture, Dr. Karrar suggests that BRI has neither been a so-called game changer, as it is frequently extoled by the Pakistani leadership, nor is it a debt trap, as it is sometimes described by commentators in Europe and North America. Rather, it is an ambitious investment mechanism yet one that inevitably is constrained and contoured by the economy and power structures that gave rise to it, and those that it operates within. An early lesson from Pakistan is that BRI is less a materialization of global connectivity and mutual prosperity—which BRI maps and official narratives would have us believe—and more a succession of entanglements, that are fundamentally local.