World-Making in Concrete and Steel: Geo-Narration as Authoritarian Spatial and Temporal Practice in China–Saudi Relations

Abstract This article introduces “geo-narratives” to show how authoritarian regimes use infrastructure as both a tool of governance and a form of spatial and temporal storytelling. Rather than treating infrastructure as purely technocratic, the article shows how authoritarian states use it as a narrative device that encodes visions of modernity and legitimacy.” Geo-narratives link selected pasts with promised futures through depoliticized, technocratic language that masks coercion. Geo-narratives are presented as central to “authoritarian space-time,” the strategic organization of space and time to reinforce authority. These narratives function as affective infrastructures, embedding emotion into spatial forms and compressing political futures into urgent, nonnegotiable timelines. Using the notion of the chronotope, the article shows how geo-narratives help legitimize centralized control by privileging state-sanctioned spatiotemporal visions. Empirically, the paper draws on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 as well as on selected infrastructural mega-projects like ports, smart cities or NEOM. It analyzes how these projects embed geopolitical narratives into material development and argues that such projects function as world-making devices that naturalize elite power and sideline dissent. In doing so, the paper advances IR’s narrative turn by conceptualizing infrastructure as a narrative device in authoritarian governance. It extends narrative IR beyond discursive analysis to include material, spatial, and temporal forms of storytelling, and integrates narrative theory with scholarship on authoritarianism, geopolitics, and infrastructural power.