The way we perceive and label a territorial fringe depends on the way we construe its position and purpose . As Italo Calvino (1978) wrote with respect to cities: âDespina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveller arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. [âŠ] Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two desertsâ.
The study of regions and regionalisms has continuously been mainstreamed into the field of international studies over the past decades, but the increase in knowledge production has not led to a correction of the threefold bias that has characterised much of the work on regions and regionalisms: the focus on states as drivers, regional organisations as locus, and formal projects as embodiment. According to this perspective, places such as Despina are transferred to the margins of regions and scholars tend to overlook the way they actually occupy the centre of their own regions.
As regional organisations have proliferated across the globe over the past three decades, the study of region-making has focused excessively on intergovernmental negotiations and their plans to configure and reconfigure a region delineated by the exclusionary amalgamation of pre-defined nation-states. Theoretical and conceptual tools have been developed accordingly to explain and understand formal top-down regional organisations, while empirical cases tend to be heavily biased towards state-centric entities such as political unions, common markets and multilateral treaties.
This book responds to the need for scientific concepts to study marginal regions as well as the need to decentre the study of regions by focusing on seemingly marginal spaces. By looking at the way regions are imagined, practiced and negotiated rather that centrally planned, the concept of fringe regionalism touches base with economic, political, and social realities outside of the realm of formal regional organisations. We argue that regionalisms emanating outside of national capitals are not necessarily marginalised political, economic or social spaces. On the contrary, their position at the fringes of formal constructions such as nation states, regional organisations or jurisdictions enable these borderlands to establish their own economic, social and political realities. Fringe regionalism, therefore, turns the focus upside down to emphasise how a siteâs marginal position can be a key feature in its constituting the centre of its own region. Cross-border metropolitanisation affects not only regions with a historic claim to configurations that precede imperial or colonial ruptures; new regions are also produced through practices that take advantage of their position in a contested or marginal setting.
The introduction of the concept of fringe regionalism provides an analytical tool for identifying alternative expressions of region-making the emergence of which is not guided by formal state authorities. Rather, the region is built on the cross-border practices of non-state actors, informal institutions rooted in statesâ peripheries and alternative, overlapping sources of legitimacy and identity. This book thus aims to decentre regionalism by studying allegedly marginal spaces and actors.
We argue that regions can indeed be found where one would least expect them, as a pluralist ontology allows us to observe alternative dynamics of region-making: not through the explicit deliberations of rational agents, whether ideational or formalised on paper, but through practices; not in state capitals, but in state peripheries, conventionally portrayed as areas of dis-connections and separation. In other words, fringe regionalism puts the emphasis on forms of agency and spatiality in region-making which are largely overlooked by the literature on regionalisms.
In order to grasp these alternative forms of agency and spatiality, we draw on a conceptualisation of statehood that rejects reductionist âpunctualizationâ (Callon 1991), whether political or geographical, by virtue of which complex entities and networks are shoehorned into fictitious, unitary state actors. In contrast to this view, we suggest that states are innervated by complex networks of patronage politics in which the formal and the informal, the state and the non-state, the legal and the extra-legal, overlap and intertwine. Dropping the rather fanciful assumption that states are monolithic entities akin to individual persons paves the way for transcending the sort of rigid dichotomies that are common in the disciplinary field of International Relations (IR) and makes it possible to observe the complex entanglements between different degrees of statehood (rather than a clear-cut distinction between state and non-state) and the multiplicity of centres. At the same time, drawing on concepts â such as patronage politics â borrowed from post-colonial and African studies (Bach and Gazibo 2012) contributes to addressing the oft-noted euro-centric bias of regionalism literature (Hurrell 2007; TelĂČ et al. 2016; Acharya 2016) while contributing to our overall de-centralising thrust.
The second chapter of this book reflects on the origins of these conceptual biases. It highlights the inadequate treatment of agency and space in regional studies and suggests that important shifts in the field of IR, such as the spatial and practice turns (Middell and Naumann 2010; Adler-Nissen 2013), require us to refurbish the toolkit used for studying regionalism. This argument is supported by a discussion of concepts and perspectives from various disciplines in social sciences mobilised to stress the regionalising potential of the spatial practices taking place in connective borderlands (Korf and Raeymaekers 2013). The delineation and analysis of the practices of region-building therefore occupies a central place in this chapter in that it presents an analytical perspective aimed at overcoming crucial shortcomings.
The third chapter uses fringe regionalism as a lens to highlight the central role of margins in the production of regions. To this end, two main cases are presented and studied in depth: the Sahara and the Caucasus. These spaces provide a quintessential embodiment of the kind of marginal spaces conventionally framed as areas of limited interaction and circumscribed state engagement. As such, they contradict most of the features of mainstream regional thinking and provide a sort of hard test for our hypothesis. The chapter is divided into three subsections to cover the gamut of dynamics that are constitutive of fringe regionalism. The first subsection focuses on regions as practiced authorities by looking at the way the power relations that emerge between political actors have shaped the fragmenting and bordering of the regional space. The second subsection focuses on regions as practiced economies by looking at patterns of informal economic intercourse at the regional scale as a consequence of the areaâs positioning as a marginal borderland. These patterns resonate in the physicality of fringe regionalism, for instance in markets and infrastructures. The last subsection focuses on regions as practiced identities by looking at how the region is imagined and legitimised in terms of narratives and identity. Regional identity is constructed through the overlapping of multiple, other points of belonging which, in contrast to the binary practice of nationality, allows for a variety of degrees of intensity.
Finally, the fourth chapter concludes our contribution by wrapping up the results of the theoretical discussion and empirical analysis, and by discussing the wider relevance of fringe regionalism as a concept. In addition to a comparison of our two main cases, we offer suggestions as to how this concept might meaningfully be transferred to other cases as illustrated by Central Africa and the Triple Border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. This exercise also allows us to outline differentiations within the category of fringe regionalism.
References
- Acharya, Amitav. 2016. Regionalism Beyond EU-Centrism. In The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, ed. Tanja Börzel and Thomas Risse, 109â130. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Adler-Nissen, Rebecca, ed. 2013. Bourdieu in International Relations: Rethinking Key Concepts in IR. Abingdon: Routledge.
- Bach, Daniel, and Mamoudo...