An Art of the Region: Towards a Politics of Regionness

Abstract

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The Bologna Process Goes East? from “Third Countries” to Prioritizing Inter-regional Cooperation Between the ASEAN and EU

“…In other words, local actors play an important role in the construction of regions because they both resist and are socialized within its structures. They interact with, and simultaneously rework social meaning of new policies (Emerson 2014). These processes are also termed as 'Discursive Opportunity Structures' (DOS) which local actors utilise to identify ideas in the larger political context, that are believed to be 'sensible', 'realistic' and 'legitimate' and that facilitate the reception of certain types of framing (Koopmans and Staham 1999;McCammon et al 2007, p. 731).…”

The Place of the Region in IR

“…It recognises that, as an analytical concept, the region has the potential to ordinate, totalise and/or homogenise spaces, contexts, themes and individuals. Besides this conceptual dimension, the region is also mobilised as a sphere of action by social actors in many different senses and contexts (Haesbaert 2010a;2010b; also see Paasi 2002;Emerson 2014). What is not usually acknowledged, however, is that the relevance of the region as an 'analytical construct' , or 'artifice' -therefore, an abstraction that can be turned into a 'fact' or chains of facts about places, societies, and individuals -is not devoid of importance as an indicator and enabler of directions and political strategies.…”

“…While post-Cold War ISS has centred on theoretical efforts and concepts such as 'regional security complex' , 'regional order' , and 'security community' in order to understand security dynamics in the regional level (Buzan and Waever 2003;Lake and Morgan 2007;Morgan 2007;Katzenstein 2005;Adler and Crawford 2002), IPE scholars tend to focus on the neoliberal forces of globalisation, especially on how they shape and are shaped by processes of regionalisation (Mayall 1995;Hveem 2006;Stubbs and Reed 2006). In this literature, the region is usually depicted as a scale located in the interplays of the restructuring of national economies and national security in the face of globalisation, in which institutional initiatives may or may not happen, but where it is possible to find a constellation of forces, practices and social actors from different levels operating in such a way that proximity becomes relevant and generates senses of identification as well as particular patterns of interaction and differentiation in the face of other spatialities and geographic areas (Hameiri 2013;Emerson 2014; also see Haesbaert 2009). …”

“…On the one hand, IR scholars widely acknowledge the importance of the notion of region in contemporary geopolitical discourse, forming part of and interacting with the other spheres of social life -local, metropolitan, national, international and global -that play central roles in the post-Cold War world. On the other, they fail to interrogate the discipline's ways of mapping the world, or their implications for the notion of region and 'the politics of regionness' (Emerson 2014) -that is, the political struggles that mark processes of regionalisation or region-making in theory and practice. As John A Agnew (2013) has noted, IR scholars often use the term 'region' either to 'group together nations that are apparently similar and thus to simplify a greater complexity' , or to situate IR studies in a 'meso-regional field of reference' (Agnew 2013: 13) that is larger than the national, and smaller than the international.…”

“…First, I re-examine the notion of region in terms of the formative assumptions and categories of IR as a field of knowledge, often referred to as 'the level of analysis' problem and its neat discourse of scales (individual, state, international and global). Secondly, I argue that the limited gestures in both ISS and IPE towards the region, or what Guy R Emerson (2014) calls the 'politics of regionness' -problematised by John Agnew (2013), Pinar Bilgin (2005), Björn Hettne (2005), Klaus Dodds (2005), among others -is a symptom of a specific politics of scaling in IR. Even in work aimed at analysing regions and addressing their role as a social construct, they are dragged into a specific imaginary where scales are naturalised in terms of the nation-state and/or its verticalisation, the international, as a self-evident and sealed topography.…”