Krittika Uniyal is a Ph.D. scholar at the Institute of Environmental Governance and Territorial Development (GEDT), University of Geneva. She has been awarded the SNIS IO Research Stipend 2020.

Krittika’s Ph.D. research is titled Challenging the Status Quo: Critical Geopolitics of the Belt and Road Initiative through the Trans-Himalayas of Nepal and Tibet Autonomous Region, in which she examines the initiative in China’s current foreign policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Nepal. She argues that culture and value systems play an essential part in determining the behaviour of a nation-state in the international system. Her research borrows extensively from the non-Western IR theories emerging specifically from China and largely from the Global South. In contributing to this, her research examines the discourses of critique and justification concerning Nepal’s participation in China’s BRI.