Cooperation or risk? Rethinking the Belt and Road Initiative and the geopolitical dynamics of the Western Balkans

This article offers a critical reading of how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) reshapes governance and power in the Western Balkans as a European semi-periphery. Moving beyond conventional accounts that treat governance as technical capacity and geopolitical risk as objective exposure, I conceptualise governance as contested authority and power as both structural and discursive. Using panel data (2011–2024) and a synthetic difference-in-differences design, we show that BRI participation heightens geopolitical risk not only through material rivalry but also through competing narratives that politicise infrastructure and development. Debt sustainability and governance quality moderate these effects because they condition states’ vulnerability to external financial discipline and securitising discourses. By integrating geopolitical economy, critical governance theory, and the politics of risk production, the study demonstrates how global development initiatives interact with hierarchical regional orders, revealing the institutional and discursive mechanisms through which cooperation becomes politicised in semi-peripheral contexts.