Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jones, Martin
• Paasi, Anssi

Titel

Guest Editorial: Regional World(s): Advancing the Geography of Regions

Ist Teil von

• Regional studies, 2013-01, Vol.47 (1), p.1-5

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Inside academe and the intellectual industry, regions have gained currency not only in geography, but also in international relations, political science, history, and cultural and literary studies (PAA S I, 2009). Regional worlds certainly exist, yet at the same time region remains a vague category, set within a deep geographical lineage, interpreted and understood in many ways (HART, 2009). Scale also matters. If the region is for geographers archetypally a sub-state unit, among international relations scholars it refers rather to the suprastate institutional arrangements (HE TTNE et al., 1999; BEESON, 2007) of economies and governance (for example, the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR)). Cross-border regions, for their part, have become important for economists, geographers and political scientists (RUTHERF ORD and HOLMES, 2013; ZIMMERBAUER, 2013). We therefore continue to live in interesting times and regional studies remain important around the world. A resurgence of the region has thus occurred in both academic research and practical politics and governance. This has been a sort of contradiction, since the demise of the region as well as community, culture or locality that should follow from the deepening modernity and consolidating state-centric spatiality, has been predicted since the nineteenth century (WATNER, 2010). While regionalism has emerged around the world, this has not occurred similarly everywhere. Neither are the meanings of regional concepts singular in various contexts. Both these facts are clearly displayed by this international collection of papers. Reprinted by permission of Carfax Publishing, Taylor & Francis Ltd.