ABSTRACT
For a long time, the study of regions and regional orders occupied a small, if not insignificant, place in IR theory and scholarship. Now two books have appeared that claim that regions are central to our understanding of world politics.2 Not only have regions become “substantially more important” sites of conflict and cooperation than in the past,3 they have also acquired “substantial” autonomy from the system-level interactions of the global powers.4 While globalization has been the buzzword of IR scholars in describing the emerging world order, at most it co-exists with “regionalization,”5 so much so that “it is now possible to begin more systematically to conceptualize a global world order of strong regions”6 or “a world of regions.”7
