Connectivity as an economic idea: A critical conceptual review of neoliberalism, Chinese Statecraft and ASEAN hedging in Southeast Asia

"Connectivity" has become the organising objective of economic policy in Southeast Asia, invoked alike by China's Belt and Road Initiative, ASEAN's Master Plans on Connectivity, the European Union's Global Gateway and the Indo-Pacific strategies of the United States and its partners. This article asks what conception of the economy the idea presupposes, how its rival programmes embody rival economic philosophies, and what its epistemic and moral consequences are. A critical conceptual review is conducted on a documented corpus of 86 Scopus-indexed publications retrieved on 9 September 2026, spanning international political economy, development studies, regionalism, urban studies and the digital economy, read through the philosophy of economics, political discourse theory, infrastructure studies and moral economy. Connectivity performs three philosophical operations: an ontological one, which pictures the economy as flows across a friction-laden space in which every "gap" is a deficit; an epistemic one, which converts political choices into technical problems and renders the concept an empty signifier that any programme may fill; and a normative one, which presupposes that integration is good while lacking a theory of how its gains and harms are distributed. The Chinese state-led and the Western rule-based models are read as consequentialist statism and proceduralist liberalism respectively, both variegated in practice by developmental-state legacies and zoning technologies. ASEAN hedging is reconstructed as a pragmatist epistemology of economic statecraft under Knightian uncertainty. The knowledge of infrastructural risk is shown to be co-produced by social forces rather than measured, and the harms of connectivity to fall on those least connected to its decisions. The article brings infrastructure into the philosophy of economics, offers the first systematic philosophical reading of the Southeast Asian connectivity literature, and proposes a research agenda for a normative and epistemological theory of economic integration. Keywords: connectivity; philosophy of economics; neoliberalism; Belt and Road Initiative; hedging; ASEAN; infrastructure; moral economy; political economy