BETWEEN GEOPOLITICS AND GEOECONOMY – THE SILK ROAD DISCOURSE IN DIPLOMACY OF JAPAN

POPOVIĆ Slobodan (Slobodan Popović, PhD Candidate. University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences),

The main purpose of the paper is to critically analyze the manifestation of the Silk Road discourse in Japanese foreign policy behavior on both diplomatic and practical levels. That will be done through usage of the content method analyses and approaches which stem from critical geopolitics and geoeconomic thoughts. Proposed methodological framework and theoretical approach have been chosen with an aim to attest the general hypothesis of the paper, which is: Japan uses the Silk Road discourse as a tool to improve its geopolitical and geoeconomic position and interconnectivity in the Central Asian region. The first part of the paper will tackle the meaning of discourse as a social construction and its interlacement with strategic moves of foreign policy. This part of the paper will be helpful to understand the reasons why the Silk Road as a social construction and diplomatic discourse possesses enormous importance to Japanese geopolitical and geoeconomic strategies towards the Central Asian region. The second part of the paper will analyze the development of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Central Asian states since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with a focus on multilateral diplomatic initiatives that Japan has triggered and still pursues in the Central Asian space. The third part of the paper will be dedicated to the analyses of infrastructural projects that Japan has implemented in Central Asia. In the Japanese case, those projects express the conditionality between geopolitics and geoeconomy.

Keywords: Japan, Central Asia, Silk Road discourse, diplomacy, geopolitics, geoeconomics, interconnectivity, infrastructural projects