The winner of the 2025 Jacqueline Pigeot prize is Loris MEISSIMILLY, for a Master 2 thesis written under the supervision of Gilles Guiheux entitled “A discontinuous ‘new Silk Road’. Representations and territorializations of the China-Central Asia-West Asia corridor of the Belt and Road Initiative”.

The China-Central Asia-West Asia corridor is one of the six economic corridors around which the Belt and Road Initiative is structured. This dissertation examines the representations and territorialization processes of the corridor, understood as the processes by which the corridor has the capacity to restructure its territory. The objective is not only to deconstruct official representations and determine whether they make it a politico-diplomatic tool, but also to analyze the extent to which the corridor restructures the geographical spaces where it unfolds. To this end, a large corpus has been compiled, including Chinese academic articles, diplomatic texts, maps depicting the corridor, investment guides, statistical data, and press articles. While representations of the corridor evoke a mobilizing imagination for the countries involved, they do not constitute an object of diplomatic discourse in themselves, and the territorialization of the corridor remains limited and primarily confined to Central Asia, with significant constraints hindering its development.