Challenging the Concept of the Region: The Indo-Pacific as an Example of an Emerging “Artificial” Region

Year 2022, Volume: 1 Issue: 2, 17 - 31, 30.12.2022

Vuslat Nur Şahin

Abstract

This article demonstrates that the social sciences and humanities have a variety of conceptual tools for deciding questions of regional nomenclature, but that existing theories of world regions do not easily account for the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as an organizing idea in world politics. Indeed, the Indo-Pacific would not be considered a likely candidate for “regionhood” from the perspective of the most prominent schools of thought within regional studies, for this study Old Regionalism, New Regionalism and Comparative Regionalism’s theorical approaches testing in the case of Indo-Pacific. If the Indo-Pacific has a claim to regionhood, then, it is not because dispassionate observers have assessed that there is something empirical about this geographic space that warrants its categorization as a world region. Rather, the Indo-Pacific is a region only because a certain set of political actors have willed it into existence. In this sense, the Indo-Pacific is an artificial region – the product of political interests and manipulation. While all regions are artificial to a certain degree – that is, concepts are human-made by definition, and none are independent from the political world – the Indo-Pacific is perhaps more artificial than other world regions in the sense that the region would likely never have been conjured if not for political purposes. Thus, the Indo-Pacific construct is not just changing world politics – it is also altering the academic study of world politics in some important ways.

Keywords

Region, Regionalism, Indo-Pacific, Asia-Pacific, ASEAN

Thanks

Some of the ideas of the paper was firstly presented in the ISA 2022, Nashville, I am very thankful to questions and feedbacks of participants. I also express my special thanks to Dr Peter Harris, for his suggestions and feedback on my manuscript, and the anonymous reviewers. The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

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