ABSTRACT
Building on a thorough genealogical overview of “regional” thinking in the discipline of geography, Anssi Paasi opens the edited volume by positing a crucial task for the contributors of this volume: how can IR and (critical) geography benefit from each other in dialogue without making the ever-expanding vocabulary of research on regions only more diverse and more eclectic? By tracing the scholarship of the field through various phases, Paasi outlines how the discipline of geography reached its current predicament of fragmentation. His contribution, however, is much more than a history of modern social science (from “pre-scientific” to “critical”) through the lenses of scholarship on regions. He argues that past approaches are still present or have — as in the case of “statistical regions” — returned in new forms. Paasi outlines a mesmerising mix of scholarly approaches and focal points, some of which are overlapping with (or even inspired by) IR theory, while others — such as the literature on spatial fetishization — serve as a much-needed wake-up call and inspiration for the IR scholars (see Busse and Lopez Lucia) contributing to this volume.
