| Summary/Abstract |
Regionalism1 projects are major sites of governance, cooperation, and conflicts today. Beyond trade agreements, they also concern development, security and political issues. Some projects have developed what scholars call a high level of ‘regionness’, an agency to act on, and influence world politics as autonomous actors.2 This development of ‘regionness’ is significant in two main ways. At the global level, as regionalism interacts with processes of globalisation, it emerges from region-builders’ multiple strategies to mediate, shape, profit, or shield themselves from globalisation. At the national level, ‘regionness’ is also a process of state transformation through which coalitions of actors relocate ‘the governance of particular issues beyond the scope of national governance and politics’.3 Regionalism has thus become a major form of political rule in international politics, and studying interactions that occur both within and between regions, as well as between regions and the international system is crucial to understand how the world works today.
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