ABSTRACT
Regionalization and transnationalization are among the most used phrases in comments on international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE). It often seems like much of the complexity and confusion in our present world (dis)order can be explained be referring to these words. The argument in this chapter is not that such references are necessarily wrong, but that references to regionalization and transnationalization are often conducted without any attempt at giving these words any form of contextualized content. An important objective of this chapter is to redress this situation by arguing for a middle-range approach towards a 'real' political economy of African states. The point of departure for this attempt is the assumption that regionalization and transnationalization as sociocultural/economic trends and phenomena are making their presence felt on all societies. However, I will also argue that the logics of regionalization and transnationalization are not uniform across the global political economy. Instead, these logics are dependent upon the nature and cohesion of the states involved and what kind of international system the nature and cohesion of the participating states leads to. In order to investigate this argument, I address the issue of the relationship between the logic of the international system of post-colonial Africa and state fragmentation.
