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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.
List of contents
Introduction Part I: Historicity of Regions in Political Geography and International Relations 1. From Bounded Spaces to Relational Social Constructs: Conceptualization of the Region in Geography 2. Regionality and Globality: Two Sides of the Same Narrative 3. Regions in the System of World Politics Part II: The Reconfiguration of "Regions" through Bordering/Ordering, Security Discourses and Modes of Crises 4. The Historical and Social Embeddedness of the Post-Ottoman Space in World Society 5. Security Politics and the "Remaking" of West Africa by the European Union: From Bounded to Fuzzy Regions 6. The Persistence of the "Middle East" as a Geopolitical Invention of Security: "Denial of Coevalness" 7. Territorial Crises, States and Entitlement at the United Nations Security Council: Ukraine 2014-2018 Part III: Regions and Meta-Geographies to Come 8. A "Reliably Frozen Region"? Imagining and Materializing Arctic Regionalism 9. Cores, Continents and Regions of Equivalence? The Multidimensionality of Eurasian Meta-geography in Russian State Discourse 10. China’s Global Connectivity Politics: A Meta-Geography in the Making. Conclusion
About the author
Paul J. Kohlenberg is Chief Representative of the Heinrich-Boell-Stiftung Beijing Representative Office, China.
Nadine Godehardt is the Deputy Head of the Research Division Asia at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Germany.
Summary
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.
