Madura Island, poor, uneducated, extremely religious, famous for its brutal buffalo races and clinking bundles of gold on the wrists and necks of local women.

Now for a short time, this island that begins just a mile from the shores of the second largest Indonesian city – Surabaya – made it to the local and international press. Two Shiite men were murdered by a machete-waving crowd of bigots belonging to the Sunni majority. In the single hamlet of Nanggernang (Karang Gayam village), in the center of the island, some 50 houses were destroyed, most of them burned down.

Regions are socially constructed areas defined by state, supra-state, and societal agents, with shifting territorial, economic, and sociopolitical parameters. In contrast to the dominant literature, which has focused on states and state-constructed regions, we assess multiple forces in defining, constructing, and deconstructing regional formations in an epoch in which competing definitions of, and approaches to, region and nation challenge the reigning order (Katzenstein and Shiraishi 1997; Gamble and Payne 1996; Hamanaka 2009). Political, geostrategic, economic, social, and cultural factors may all shape a regional order and its position in the world economy. In light of competing claims of national, regional, and global forces, we inquire into the possibility of contemporary region formation that does not rest on the hegemony of a single nation or power, that is, an imperium whether formal or informal, and which serves, in varying degrees, the interests of the nations and peoples that comprise it. In particular, consider the interplay between economic nationalism and region formation, including China, Japan, Korea, and the United States.