This book brings together the many different institutions and ideas to be found under the label of 'regionalism'; it places the revival of regionalism in a broader historical perspective; it asks whether there are common factors behind the revival of regionalism in so many different parts of the world; and it analyzes the cumulative impact of different brands of regionalism on international order. Leading specialists examine recent developments in regional cooperation in different parts of the world. They take a critical look at recent trends towards the new regionalism and regionalization, assessing their origins, their present and future prospects, and their place in the evolving international order. As well as concentrating on specific regions, including Pacific-Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, the book looks at theories of regionalism, the balance between regionalization and globalization in the world economy, the relation between regional organizations and the United Nations, and the relationship between the revival of regionalism and questions of identity and nationalism.

Textbook on regionalism and its role in a global marketplace, ideal for students of IR and globalisation.

Exploring regionalism from a political economic perspective, this text investigates why regional arrangements are formed, the conditions under which these arrangements solidify, and why they take on different institutional forms.

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.

Since the late 1980s, there has been a global upsurge of various forms of regionalist projects. The widening and deepening of the European Union (EU) is the most prominent example, but there has also been a revitalization or expansion of many other regionalist projects as well, such as the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). More or less every government in the world is engaged in regionalism, which also involves a rich variety of business and civil society actors, resulting in a multitude of regional processes in most fields of contemporary politics. In this new text, Fredrik Söderbaum draws on decades of scholarship to provide a major reassessment of regionalism and to address questions about its origins, logic and consequences. By examining regionalism from historical, spatial, comparative and global perspectives, Rethinking Regionalism transcends the deep intellectual and disciplinary rivalries that have limited our knowledge about the subject. This broad-ranging approach enables new and challenging answers to emerge as to why and how regionalism evolves and consolidates, how it can be compared, and what its ongoing significance is for a host of issues within global politics, from security and trade to development and the environment. Retaining a balanced and authoritative style throughout, this text will be welcomed for its uniquely comprehensive examination of regionalism in the contemporary global age.

This book explains cooperative and confrontational regional orders in the post-Cold War era. Applying a push-and-pull framework to the evolution of regional orders, the book’s theoretical section compares regional dynamics and studies the transformation and authority of governing arrangements among key regional actors who manage security and institutional cooperation. This presents a novel approach to comparing non-Western regional orders, and helps forge a better integration between International Relations disciplinary approaches and area studies. The empirical section analyzes Central Eurasia and South America within the period 1989-2017, using case studies and interviews with decision-makers, practitioners and experts. The volume demonstrates that soft engagement strategies from extra-regional great powers and internationalist domestic coalitions framed in a stable democratic polity are forces for peaceful interaction, while hard engagement strategies from great external powers plus nationalist coalitions within democratic backsliding in key regional powers present negative outlooks for regional cooperation. This book will be of much interest to students of regional security, comparative politics, area studies and International Relations.

In the evolving post-Westphalian world regional entities become key political and economic players as the authors argue in this volume. As a result of regionalization, the international politics and economics is witnessing great transformations too. This volume explores some ideas of how these transformations may develop. It is written by three generations of researchers and scholars at European, Russian, and Asian higher education institutions. Their different perspectives are integrated in a coherent, multi-dimensional view to answer challenges facing what is called increasingly “Greater Eurasia”. The volume employs a rigorous conceptual framework over a wide geographic range and applies different approaches to ask and answer challenging questions. The arguments presented in this book are built around the concepts of regionalism and transregionalism. The volume is focusing on three different geographical entities: Europe, Eurasia and East Asia, and examines ASEM, EAEU, BRI, EU, ASEAN, CIS, as well as TTIP, TTP, OBOR .