ABSTRACT

This book examines what counts regarding the role and conceptualization of regions in world politics.

It presents a fresh look at which narratives awake, persist, fall dormant or re-emerge amidst diverse interlocking processes of environmental, technological and global political changes. It puts forward a thorough and multidimensional conceptualization of regions as embedded in changing, overlapping environments, and requires more attention to regions’ shifting materiality, temporality and technological underpinnings. Combing the approaches, questions and analyses of Critical IR and Political Geography, it calls for a renewed emphasis on the puzzle of how the contextual environment of regions may become more (or less) multidimensional, or how some aspects of a region’s contextual environment may be mutually constitutive in non-intuitive ways. Ultimately, it sheds light on the politics of regions and the regional scale in international politics in order to overcome the often-underlying territorial fixity of territory and space within IR approaches.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of international relations, international political sociology, political geography, regionalism, geopolitics and area studies.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

part I|41 pages

Historicity of regions in political geography and international relations

chapter 1|19 pages

From bounded spaces to relational social constructs

Conceptualisation of the region in geography

chapter 2|20 pages

Regionality and globality

Two sides of the same narrative

part II|74 pages

The reconfiguration of “regions” through bordering/ordering, security discourses and modes of crises