The Multidimensionality Of Regions In World Politics

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.

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

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.

This book presents a new theory of global politics and international relations utilizing the world systems perspective of the new political geography. Tom Nierop begins his study by reviewing the spatial organization of the international system and sketches the theoretical underpinning of his enquiry by identifying the interaction of states in regional systems as the key dynamic of the global system. He then considers the levels of global connectedness and illustrates his theoretical construct by a detailed examination of global patterns of diplomatic representation and the changing patterns and functions of intergovernmental organizations since 1950. He then turns to world trade patterns and shows how they interlink and coincide with political systems to produce the dominant modern system of international political economy.

We are witnessing turbulent times which inspire both anxiety and hope. Many global trends are sweeping across a transforming world. To make these movements and changes more understandable, Trends and Transformations in World Politics introduces the reader to the study of world politics in a period of rapid readjustment. This book also focuses on world-historical transformations as a general phenomenon, showing how the twenty-first century change in world politics fits into broader patterns of macro-historical change. To do that, the perspective of major international relations theories is utilized, and a discussion of transformation is grounded within a conceptual framework. This book will strengthen the reader’s understanding of the trends and transformations in world politics.

The three main levels of analysis in international relations have been the systemic, the national, and the individual. A fourth level that falls between the systemic and the national is the region. It is woefully underdeveloped in comparison to the attention afforded the other three. Yet regions tend to be distinctive theaters for international politics. Otherwise, we would not recognize that Middle Eastern interstate politics somehow does not resemble Latin American interstate politics or interstate politics in Southern Africa (although once the Middle East and Southern Africa may have seemed more similar in their mutual fixation with opposition to domestic policies in Israel and South Africa, respectively). This book, divided into three parts, first makes a case for studying regional politics even though it must also be appreciated that regional boundaries are also hazy and not always easy to pin down empirically. The second part examines power distributions within regions as an important entry point to studying regional similarities and differences. Two emphases are stressed. One is that regional power assessments need to be conditioned by controlling for weak states which are more common in some regions than they are in others. The other emphasis is on regional power hierarchies. Some regions have strong regional hierarchies while others do not. Regions with strong hierarchies operate much differently from those without them in the sense that the former are more pacific than the latter. The third part of the book focuses on regional differences in terms of conflict behavior, order preferences, rivalries, and rivalry termination.

Illuminates the interplay between regional concerns and the international context, which together define the hierarchy of states. Building on case studies, this book demonstrates that this status cannot be attained solely by building a military or economic power base.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.