(iPoster) The Region Is Not a Place: Scale and Empire’s Afterlives in World Order

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  In Poster Session: Poster Session: IR Theory

Abstract

This paper rethinks the concept of region by foregrounding the problem of political scale in International Relations (IR). While IR has long treated the nation-state as the primary unit of political analysis—and more recently turned to the planetary as a site of global crisis—the regional scale has remained conceptually thin, despite being repeatedly mobilized to manage the contradictions of international order. As a result, IR struggles to explain why contemporary crises of mobility, security, and governance are so often articulated, governed, and contested at the regional level.

The paper argues that this theoretical blind spot is not accidental. Modern empires organized political space regionally, producing spatial formations that mediated between global ambition and territorial rule. These regional arrangements did not disappear with decolonization or the rise of liberal international order. Instead, they persisted as afterlives of empire, providing the spatial scaffolding through which post-imperial order was assembled and maintained—without being recognized as political projects in their own right.

To capture this dynamic, the paper reconceptualizes the region not as a bounded place or intermediate level, but as a spatial technology through which political order is scaled, governed, and contested. It proposes three analytical modalities—epistemic, infrastructural, and reparative regionalisms—to examine how regional space is continuously produced through knowledge practices, material infrastructures, and ethical-political struggles. Together, these modalities shift IR from a critique centered on actors or norms to a critique of scale, showing how the regional remains a durable yet unstable substructure of international order. This perspective helps illuminate why regions today appear simultaneously indispensable to governance and marginal to theory, even as they have become key sites where the limits of liberal international order are most acutely exposed.

Author

• Minah Kang, Johns Hopkins University