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See Curriculum Vitae for a full list of publications.
Stream 1: Global China, development, the Belt and Road initiative, infrastructure
This research stream develops a critical, grounded examination of Global China by interrogating how Chinese-led development, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and infrastructure projects are imagined, enacted, and lived across Asia, with particular emphasis on Southeast Asia and Laos. Across conceptual interventions and sustained empirical work, the research moves beyond state-centric or macro-geopolitical readings of the BRI to foreground corridors, zones, and railways as socio-spatial processes that reorder land, labor, mobility, temporality, and visibility. Methodologically, this research combines multi-sited ethnography, mobile and experiential methods, and long-term engagement with specific sites to show how infrastructure simultaneously consolidates state power, generates uneven development, and produces friction, suspension, and anticipation. It advances several analytical contributions, such as a genealogy of Global China as a contested geographical imaginary; processes of “corridorization”; and a politics of sight that attends to spectacle, in/visibility, and everyday life in the shadow of infrastructure. Collectively, these publications contribute to scholarship that underscores the ways in which the BRI is not a coherent model or monolithic strategy, but a heterogeneous, negotiated, contested, and often contradictory set of infrastructural world-making practices that must be understood through their grounded social, political, and spatial effects.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
What is Global China? From development and geopolitics to the environment and everyday, U.S.-China Perception Monitor, The Carter Center China Focus.
Unsettling Global China, Dialogues in Human Geography (DiCarlo & DeBoom 2025b)
Six paths of Global China: A genealogy of a contested geographical imaginary, Dialogues in Human Geography (DiCarlo & DeBoom 2025b). See all response articles under "Article Forum 3".
Chinese Investment in Laos. Lao Land for Life project (DiCarlo & Lu 2025)
The corridor as commodity: Enclosure, legibility, and uneven development in Southeast Asian railway projects. Antipode (DiCarlo & Bachrach 2025)
Behind the Spectacle of the Belt and Road Initiative: Corridor Perspectives, In/visibility, and a Politics of Sight. In Seeing China’s Belt and Road, edited by Rachel Silvey and Edward Schatz. Oxford University Press (DiCarlo 2025)
Cycling as method, train as transect: Exploring infrastructural friction and flow through mobile ethnography. In Being Present: Emerging Ethnographic Perspectives and the Study of Laos, edited by Rosalie Stolz and Paul-David Lutz. The University of Chicago Press (DiCarlo 2026)
Speed, Suspension, and Stasis: Waiting in the Shadow of Infrastructure. In Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds, edited by Jean-Paul Addie, Michael Glass, and Jen Nelles. Bristol University Press (DiCarlo 2024)
Bringing a Politics of Sight to the Belt and Road Initiative: In/visibility, Infrastructure, Global China. Transformations: Belt and Road in Global Perspective. Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto (DiCarlo 2024)
Forum: A Decade of the Belt and Road Initiative. Global China Pulse, 2(1): 117-146. (DiCarlo 2023)
The BRI, Grounded. Global China Pulse, 2(1): 143-146. (DiCarlo 2023)
Eventuality and Rhythms of Life in a City Yet-to-Come. Global China Pulse, 1(1): 145-159. (DiCarlo 2022)
DiCarlo, Jessica. 2022. Boten: from Dawn till Dusk. Global China Pulse, 1(1): 141-144. (DiCarlo 2022)
China’s global development model: Looking beyond the Belt and Road Initiative. Oakes, Tim, Jessica Clendenning, Jessica DiCarlo, Matthew S. Erie, Max Hirsh, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Hasan H. Karrar, Verena La Mela, Juliet Lu, Till Mostowlansky, Galen Murton, Huiying Ng, Roger Norum, Nadine Plachta, Björn Reichhardt, Alessandro Rippa, Jasnea Sarma, Emilia Sulek, Dorothy Tang, Zarina Urmanbetova and Thomas White. 2022.
Demystifying the Belt and Road Initiative. Joniak-Lüthi, Agnieszka, Alessandro Rippa, Jessica Clendenning, Jessica DiCarlo, Matthew S. Erie, Max Hirsh, Hasan H. Karrar, Verena La Mela, Juliet Lu, Till Mostowlansky, Galen Murton, Huiying Ng, Roger Norum, Tim Oakes, Nadine Plachta, Björn Reichhardt, Jasnea Sarma, Emilia Sulek, Dorothy Tang, Zarina Urmanbetova and Thomas White. 2022.
(Re)constructing state power through the Laos-China Railway project.Geoforum, 124(2): 79-88. Suhardiman, Diana, Jessica DiCarlo, Oulavanh Keovilignavong, Jonathan Rigg, and Alan Nicol. 2021.
Development as Palimpsest: Infrastructures Revived in Boten’s Architecture. Roadsides, 004: 15-23. (DiCarlo 2020)
From China Model to Global China (ChinaMade Brief #14). ChinaMade: Asian Infrastructures and the ‘China Model’ of Development. (DiCarlo & Oakes 2022)
Infrastructures of Urban Life Yet-to-Come (ChinaMade Brief #12). ChinaMade: Asian Infrastructures and the ‘China Model’ of Development. (DiCarlo & Wittekind 2022)
Boten Special Economic Zone on The People’s Map of Global China. (DiCarlo 2022)
Stream 2: Critical minerals, China, and the geopolitical economy of decarbonization
This research stream examines the political economy, political ecology, and geopolitics of critical minerals, with particular attention to China’s role in reshaping extractive governance, supply chains, and environmental authority amid intensifying geopolitics. Across comparative and multi-scalar studies of rare earths, cobalt, and other strategic minerals, the work shows how decarbonization is not simply a technical or environmental project, but a contested process structured by fractured state authority, corporate power, financialization, and uneven global development. It also shows how “green” standards and ESG instruments — advanced by both Chinese and Western actors — operate as technologies that reconfigure responsibility and risk without resolving extractive harms. Through case studies spanning China, the US, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and transnational mineral supply chains, this body of work advances concepts such as fractured extraction, just-shoring, midstream geopolitics, and minerals at the margins to show how the low-carbon transition reproduces colonial and capitalist inequalities even as it claims environmental leadership. Collectively, it contributes a relational, anti-exceptionalist account of China’s environmental power while offering broader insights into the governance, geopolitics, and justice implications of decarbonization efforts. Part of the Critical Mineral Research Hub.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
Midstream geopolitics: Processing power in critical mineral supply chains. Political Geography. Raphael Deberdt, Philippe Le Billon, and Jessica DiCarlo. 2026.
On the coloniality of green financialization: Green capital landing and accumulation by decarbonization. Geoforum. Raphael Deberdt, Jessica DiCarlo, and Philippe Le Billon. 2026.
Minerals at the margins and the new geopolitics of critical minerals. Energy Research and Social Science. Raphael Deberdt and Jessica DiCarlo. 2026.
A just energy transition requires just-shoring critical materials. Nature Energy. Jessica DiCarlo, Raphael Deberdt, Nicole Smith, Scott Odell, Aaron Malone, and Lydia Jennings. 2026.
China aspires to be an environmental leader: How should the rest of the world engage? Journal of Current Chinese Affairs. Tyler Harlan, Yixian Sun, Juliet Lu, Jessica DiCarlo, Coraline Goron, Yifei Li, Jessica Liao, KuoRay Mao, Jesse Rodenbiker, Deborah Seligsohn, Alex Wang, Niklas Weins, and Annah Lake Zhu. 2025.
Fractured extraction: mining firms, provinces and municipalities in the decentralized politics of China’s rare earth production. The China Quarterly, 1–22. Jessica DiCarlo, Cory Combs and Raphael Deberdt. 2025.
Pericentricity on the Congolese Copperbelt: How the DRC Shapes Chinese Cobalt Supply Chains and the Low-Carbon Transition. Globalizations. Raphael Debert and Jessica DiCarlo. 2024.
Standardizing “green” extractivism: Chinese & Western environmental, social, and governance instruments in the critical mineral sector. Extractive Industries and Society, 19: 101516. Raphael Debert and Jessica DiCarlo, Hyeyoon Park. 2024.
Can the Race for Decarbonization Be ‘Green’?: Critical Minerals, China’s Responsible Mining Initiatives, and the Role of Non-State Actors. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. DiCarlo 2024.
DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt – how control by local elites can shape the global battery industry. The Conversation. Deberdt, Raphael and Jessica DiCarlo. 2024.
Stream 3: Development, environment, and political ecology in Asia
This research stream brings a political ecology lens to development & environment-society relations in Asia, focusing on infrastructure development, land politics, resources, and post-disaster interventions Grounded in Southeast Asia and the Himalaya, the work centers questions of territoriality, frontiers, agrarian change,and infrastructural violence. It analyzes, for instance, how infrastructure, special economic zones, and cross-border projects reshape landscapes, producing new forms of dispossession, uneven development, and everyday negotiations over resources and sovereignty. This research builds on more than a decade of fieldwork in Laos, China, Nepal, and the greater Mekong region. Through ethnographic and policy-engaged research, it interrogates the translation, implementation, and limits of social and environmental safeguards, revealing gaps between formal standards and lived outcomes. This research also makes methodological and conceptual contributions, advancing kinesthetic methodologies to understanding society–environment relations and transformations.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
New Political Ecologies of Southeast Asia. (Special Issue). Jessica DiCarlo and Hilary Faxon. Forthcoming.
The world from a bicycle: Cycling as kinesthetic methodology. Progress in Human Geography. Mia Bennett, Jessica DiCarlo, and Sarah Elwood. 2025.
Corridors of connectivity and the infrastructural land rush in Laos. The Routledge Handbook for Global Land and Resource Grabbing. Jessica DiCarlo and Kearrin Sims. 2023.
FOCUS-BRI: Framing Opportunities for Conservation by Understanding Safeguards in the Belt and Road Initiative. Report for the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and the Hewlett Foundation. Jessica DiCarlo, Sam Williams, Aaditee Kudrimoti, Pakhi Das, Melissa Butynski, Amrita Neelakantan. 2022.
Understanding Social and Environmental Impacts and Safeguards surrounding BRI projects in Laos for Navigating the Belt and Road Initiative Phase II. Asia Society Policy Institute, New York. DiCarlo et al. (other authors anonymous). 2022.
Laos-China Railway on The People’s Map of Global China. Wanjing (Kelly) Chen and Jessica DiCarlo. 2021.
Lost in Translation: Environmental and Social Safeguards for the Laos-China Railway. Global Development Policy Center Blog, Boston University. Jessica DiCarlo. 2021.
Mind the Gap: Grounding Development Finance and Safeguards through Land Compensation on the Laos-China Belt and Road Corridor. Global China Initiative Working Paper 013. Boston University, Global Development Policy Center. DiCarlo 2020.
Socio-environmental implications of the Laos-China Railway. Case Study for the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research. In Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative: Case Study Perspectives, edited by Liu Weidong. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Song Zhouying and Jessica DiCarlo. 2021.
Post-disaster agricultural transitions in Nepal. Ambio, 1–12. Jessica DiCarlo, Katie Epstein, Robin Marsh & Inger Måren. 2018.
Recovery and adaptation after the 2015 Nepal earthquakes: A smallholder household perspective. Ecology and Society, 23(1): 29. Katie Epstein, Jessica DiCarlo, Robin Marsh, Bikash Adhikari, Dinesh Paudel, Isha Ray & Inger Måren. 2018.
Coping Strategies of Smallholder Farming Communities after the 2015 Nepal Earthquake: Insights into Post-Disaster Resilience and Social–Ecological Change. Case Studies in the Environment. Katie Epstein, Jessica DiCarlo, Robin Marsh, Isha Ray & Inger Måren. 2017.
Adoption of information and communication technologies for early detection of breast and cervical cancers in low- and middle-income countries. The Journal of Global Oncology and the Annals of Global Health, 82(3): 453-454. Jessica DiCarlo, Sri Gopakumar, Suneeta Krishnan & Preet K. Dhillan. 2016.
Stream 4: Critical geopolitics & political economy of US-China competition
This research stream builds on a recognition that contemporary power struggles and geopolitics cut across the preceding research streams. As my Global China research has increasingly accounted for US-China competition, I co-founded the Second Cold War Observatory (SCWO) with Seth Schindler (University of Manchester). The SCWO has quickly grown into a widely recognized global research network spanning six continents. This research stream advances critical geopolitical and political economy analyses of US-China competition by reframing it not as a bipolar return to Cold War logics, but as a historically distinct struggle over infrastructure, networks, and state–capital relations within an unevenly globalized capitalist system. This work develops and mobilizes concepts such as the infrastructure state, state-capitalist geopolitics, and polyalignment to explain how rivalry is organized through control over infrastructure, digital, production, and financial networks, and how it is mediated by regional conflicts, transnational connections, and local agency. My research also shows how states navigate, exploit, and are constrained by competing development and investment initiatives. Taken together, this work traces how power is exercised through networks of global connectivity and how infrastructural rivalry restructures sovereignty, development trajectories, and geopolitical strategy beyond the traditional views of great-power politics.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
The Emergence and the Politics of Polyalignment. Third World Quarterly. (Special Issue) Jessica DiCarlo, Shahar Hameiri, Seth Schindler, Lee Jones. 2026.
he Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press. Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo, editors. 2022. T
nfrastructural polyalignment and Himalayan geopolitics: subjugation, small-state agency, and regional competition in Nepal. Third World Quarterly. Jessica DiCarlo and Dinesh Paudel. 2025. I
The new frontline: The US-China battle for control of global networks. State of Power 2025: The Geopolitics of Capitalism. The Transnational Institute. Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo, Steve Rolf, Seth Schindler. 2025.
The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks. Geopolitics, 29(4): 1083-1120. Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, Jessica DiCarlo, Nicholas Jepson, Steve Rolf, Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ, Louis Cyuzuzo, Meredith DeBoom, Alireza F. Farahani, Imogen T. Liu, Hannah McNicola, Julie T. Miao, Philip Nock, Gilead Teri, Maximiliano Facundo Vila Seoane, Kevin Ward, Tim Zajontz, and Yawei Zhao. 2023.
Towards a critical geopolitics of China-US rivalry: Pericentricity, regional conflicts, and transnational connections. Area, 54(4): 638-645. Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo. 2022.
The new Cold War and the rise of the 21st-century infrastructure state. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(2): 331-346. Seth Schindler, Jessica DiCarlo and Dinesh Paudel. 2021.
Multipolar infrastructures: Mosaic geopolitics and state restructuring in Laos. In The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press. Jessica DiCarlo and Micah Ingalls. 2022.
Twenty-first-century Third Worldism? In The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press. Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo. 2022.
Geopolitics, infrastructure, and the emergent geographies of US-China competition. In The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide. Bristol University Press. Jessica DiCarlo and Seth Schindler. 2022.
What did you do during the Trump Times? Global Policy Journal. Jessica DiCarlo and Seth Schindler. 2025.
Sinews of control: How state-capitalist geopolitics is reshaping global networks and power. The Monitor, by The Carter Center. Jessica DiCarlo, Ilias Alami, Steve Rolf, and Seth Schindler. 2025.
Will Biden pass the America LEADS Act and start a new Cold War with China? Global Policy Journal. Jessica DiCarlo and Seth Schindler. 2020.
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