New geographies of the special economic zone? Infrastructural bundling and local contingencies on the China-Pakistan economic corridor

This paper examines the geographies of a new phase of special economic zones (SEZs) tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. Drawing on analysis of Pakistan, we make two key arguments: Firstly, that a new wave of SEZs is increasingly bundled into broader infrastructure corridor initiatives. We demonstrate that the implementation of the latest SEZs in the Pakistani context emerges only after significant investment flows into multimodal networks of power generation and interconnectivity through the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. This provides the necessary infrastructural arrangements through which attempts to ramp up manufacturing capacity may proceed. Secondly, we critique the assumption of a globally replicable, repeatable Chinese SEZ model that can be deployed ‘anywhere’ without considering the contingency of local conditions. We demonstrate this contingency through the dynamic role of land across four stages of SEZ deployment, particularly in Allama Iqbal Industrial City and three associated zones in Pakistan.