ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that any region needs to be identified in relation to its social-systemic environment and to be contextualised in relation to the ordering principles that emanate from the environment at play. Such an approach does not require relying on the idea of any “scalar” hierarchy between the national and the global — showcasing the growing compatibility between critical geography and IR. However, regions are by themselves never a direct expression of any single ordering principle, but a mix thereof. Regions are thus not theoretically compatible with any scalar logic in which ordering principles relate to certain ideal-type forms of political organisation, such as segmentation (e.g. into territorial states), stratification (e.g. a great power concert/a world state) or pure functional differentiation (e.g. a world governed by problem-oriented international regimes). Regions usually express combinations of segmentation and functional differentiation and this also explains why scalar approaches have thus far struggled to present broadly applicable conceptualisations of the region. The chapter concludes by illustrating some of its arguments in relation to the Arctic, referring to other contributions of the volume as well.