Welcome to another edition of Geopolitics and Empire.

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podcasting, Geopolitics, or the meaning of life, as I like to tongue in cheek say and do check out my affiliates. Leave a podcast review. And joining us for the first time, I've been wanting to get him on for a while, is Yassiru Rana Raja, who's a consulting specialist at China International Economic Consultants and the founding director at Belton Road Initiative Sri Lanka. Welcome to Geopolitics and Empire.

Yes, you do.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

It's good to be here.

Yeah, thanks for coming on.

I've been following you for a while.

Enjoy some of your commentary and analysis.

And before getting your sort of your big picture view,

anything you want to tell us about your work, your research,

your interests, and the Belt and Road

initiative, Sri Lanka? Yes, so I'm Yasir, I'm originally from Sri Lanka. I'm mostly based in

Colombo and Beijing. My background is I started as looking into the environment law and through that I saw the funding gaps for the developing countries or what we call the developing economies.

Development finance.

In fact, the lack of developing finance for the developing countries which are having right now.

So through that, I found like how Belt and Road Initiative of Sri Lanka,

Belt and Road Initiative of China have been an alternative way for the international finances.

Through that, when I was reading my master's, I got more interested in this area and

together with a few friends, we started an organization called BRISL.

...