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Pakistan occupies an elevated role in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and hosts its so-called flagship project, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Existing literature has often interpreted this project from a geopolitical perspective, as a vehicle through which a rising China projects influence on a peripheral country and advances its own centrality in international affairs. While such motivations certainly played a major role in getting the project off the ground, they are not the sole determinant of its design, or the heated controversies it triggered within Pakistan. This paper seeks to capture both dimensions by analysing the development of CPEC, and the handling of the conflicts it sparked, through a lens of overlapping centre–periphery relations: one between China and Pakistan at the international level, and one between Islamabad and peripheral regions and groups within the country. I argue that this model best captures the pivotal position and resulting agency of national governments in shaping local BRI implementations. It also shows how the BRI is not a straight case of Chinese influence radiating outwards; rather, contestation by local actors in turn forces adaptations in Chinese foreign and security policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructure has played an agential role in the securitisation of everyday life in the Karakoram high mountains of north Pakistan. Geopolitics bear heavily on this region where Pakistan shares borders with China, with whom it has aligned its foreign and security policy, and with India, with whom Pakistan remains embroiled in a long‐standing territorial dispute. Consequently, in the Karakoram, geopolitical anxieties have reflected inwards onto local populations through both security infrastructure and securitised infrastructure. In this postcolony frontier space, statecraft also frequently bypasses normative legal and administrative structures; such exceptions to normative law and administration have antecedents in colonial statecraft on the territorial margins of empire. This paper also argues that long cycles of military rule have allowed the military to acquire and project technocratic expertise, become custodians of state‐led development, and recently, to assume guardianship of, and to enter into joint financing with China on, construction projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geopolitical environmentof South Asia has significantlychanged in last two decades. This change essentially poses various challenges and brings opportunities for Pakistan in the region. The prime focus of this paper is to give an insight into challenges faced by Pakistan in a historical narrationand to critically evaluate the implications of emerging geopolitical environment for Pakistan's foreign policy. Therefore, this study, by adopting realist perspective, develops "stress and strain" frameworkto analyses the impacts of regional geopoliticson foreign policy of Pakistan. Thishistorical analysisreveals that the interest of great powers in the region changes with passage of timeand thus changes their allianceswith regional states. This shifting of alliances modifies the way of interaction among regional states. The study concludes with suggestions that the articulation of national interest and foreign policy of Pakistanneeds to be reviewed continuouslyin order to overcome the emerging challenges and to find the best possible way of engagement at regional and international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]