Economic corridors are under construction across the planet. Trillions of dollars are being spent and they will have significant implications for international politics and, ultimately, world order. However, there has been limited conceptual work on them to date, especially in International Relations. This article contributes to that gap by explaining the dominant rationale before offering a conceptualisation of economic corridors as an essentially extractivist paradigm. This counter-hegemonic proposition revolves around four relational theses: (1) economic corridors are a ‘fix’ for crises of capitalism; (2) economic corridors exacerbate class struggle; (3) economic corridors are tools for exploitation; (4) economic corridors facilitate financial extraction. In so doing it unmasks the dominant rationale as ideological cover for valorisation and accumulation based on extractive and exploitative relations with human and extra-human nature. Rather than contributing to inclusive and sustainable development as proponents claim, the article contends economic corridors reinforce power asymmetries between states, countries, and classes, thereby extending and entrenching processes of uneven and combined development. The argument is substantiated with empirical reference to mainland Southeast Asia but aims to advance understanding of extractive dynamics integral to the concept of economic corridors and hence operative worldwide.

The study of Eurocentrism has become a hallmark of postcolonial International Relations theories. Of particular concern in this literature has been the resilience of Eurocentrism despite conscious efforts to move towards a post-Eurocentric understanding of world politics. This study argues that while existing works have highlighted many of the reasons why Eurocentrism persists today, it has not been sufficiently identified and conceptualised. In particular, why some policy actors, who have a vested interest in moving beyond Eurocentrism, inadvertently reproduce Eurocentrism? This article proposes to distinguish between different types of inadvertent reproductions. In particular it highlights rhetorical critique, deconstruction, decentring and dehierarchising, as different ways to critique, inadvertently reproduce and partially modify Eurocentrism. To illustrate this situation, this article looks at Turkey's migration policies and documents how Turkish governing elites have openly claimed the need to upend the Eurocentric order, yet have reproduced it in practice.

The Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)'s attempts to build livelihoods for refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the importance of cross-border activity to refugees’ socioeconomic lives, such transnational activity has been institutionally invisible to and hindered by the international agencies seeking to assist them. The article explores how and why refugees’ cross-border activities have been systematically ignored by international institutions. As a theoretical starting point, it draws upon the post-development literature, and notably the work of James Ferguson, which explores how international institutions frequently misunderstand the agency and strategies of their subject populations. However, contra Ferguson's predominantly Foucauldian methodological and epistemologically approach, the article adopts a mixed methods approach, and emphasises the agency of aid workers, bureaucratic politics, and political economy in its account of the disjuncture between international institutions’ state-centric livelihoods programmes and refugees’ own cross-border economic strategies.