The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese state/capitalist programme of transnational infrastructure construction initiated in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, Chinese banks extended hundreds of billions of dollars –principally across Asia, but also Europe and Africa – for transportation and energy networks. Recently released statistics, however, suggest that project lending for the BRI collapsed from 2016 onwards. Our paper examines the reasons for this contraction through a case-study of the BRI in Africa. We contend that the lending contraction resulted from political and economic contradictions generated by this form of international interconnection, including the types of debt traps it helped create. This outcome is explained partly by the fact that the BRI is simultaneously a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. Whereas the balance of economic risks is arguably skewed against borrowers (in some cases leading to debt traps), from a geopolitical perspective, the Chinese state also seeks to expand influence in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. This creates counter-pressure on further expansion of such financing, which, complemented by domestic economic implications of loan failure, helps to explain the contraction.

In this dialogue, geographer Joel Wainwright interviews the celebrated Marxist philosopher, Kojin Karatani. Their wide-ranging discussion examines key concepts by a series of philosophers – especially Kant, Marx, Hegel and Derrida – through an analysis of several core geographical concerns: the spatial organization of global capitalism, the formation of empires and territorial nation states, the current economic crisis, and more. The interview concludes with a discussion of the conditions of possibility of transcending the dominant social formation (i.e. capital-nation-state).

In the face of climate change, along what path might we attempt transformation that could create a just and livable planet? Recently we proposed a framework for anticipating the possible political–economic forms that might emerge as the world's climate changes. Our framework outlines four possible paths; two of those paths are defined by what is called “Leviathan,” the emergence of a form of planetary sovereignty. In this article we elaborate by examining the adaptive character of emergent planetary sovereignty. To grasp this, we need a theory that can see through our ostensibly “postpolitical” moment to grasp not the disintegration but the adaptation of the political. What does it mean to say the political adapts? Reduced to its essence, it is to say that if the character of political life prevents a radical response to crisis, then it is the political that must change. A materialist attempt to elaborate on this question must begin by reflecting on the manifest inequalities of power in the current mode of global political-economic regulation. After doing so, we conclude by arguing for a return to the concept of natural history.