The Contested Regional Architecture of World Politics 1

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