This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

The prospects for Australia’s relations with its most immediate region at the beginning of the decade seemed bleak indeed. On the surface at least, they continued to be troubled as the rise of terrorism and people smuggling as major security issues, and Australia’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, introduced new sources of tension into Australia’s relations with its northern neighbours. Yet by 2005 the picture had changed remarkably. John Howard’s government, despite being dogged by diplomatic gaffes and pilloried by its critics, had achieved some remarkable successes in Australia’s relations with South-East Asia. Bilateral trade agreements had been signed or were under negotiation with the region’s major economies. Talks had begun on a new security agreement with Indonesia, and the Australian Prime Minister seemed to have forged a close rapport with the first directly elected Indonesian President. Perhaps most significantly, Howard was invited to two meetings crucial to the development of a new East Asian regional institution: the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in November 2004 and the inaugural East Asia Summit in December 2005.

This chapter considers the structure of territorial cleavage from a national perspective. It focuses on patterns of polarization between regional electoral blocs, or “territorial oppositions,” in national politics. Axes of territorial cleavage arising between predominantly rural regions tend to take canonical forms associated with core–periphery politics in countries that are undergoing national economic integration and the growth of the central state. Stable axes of sectional competition, whereby leading regions square off against each other or against those on the periphery, are visible in the electoral data and in persistent policy cleavages in countries in this study. In broad outlines, these conform to models of territorial opposition in national politics advanced by earlier scholars (Lipset & Rokkan 1967; Gourevitch 1979; Bayart 2013). The analysis is built around four countries – Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda – that serve as archetypes of different patterns of territorial opposition and core–periphery politics. Tanzania is a shadow case.

This theory of regional cleavages in African politics embeds the behavioral assumptions of microlevel, ethnicity-focused models in a broader spatial, institutional, and temporal frame. A theoretically grounded framework built on economic geography, economic inequalities, and institutions produces general findings about national-level political dynamics in African countries that are close to what classical and mainstream treatments in the comparative politics and comparative political economy literatures would lead us to expect. Leveraging this perspective, this chapter reconsiders questions of economic cleavage, urban–rural politics, institutions, class politics, policy interests, opposition and regional parties, and ethnic identities in African politics. The challenges of territorial politics in regionally divided countries that confront most African countries today are increasingly prominent in non-African, postindustrial countries. This makes research on the politics of spatial inequality in African countries relevant to general understandings of how economic and spatial inequalities may heighten the challenges of national politics. For policy and politics, the analysis lends weight to calls for place-based economic development strategies that are designed to support national cohesion.

Regional competition in African countries finds expression in tensions, debates, and competition over policy. Regional economic tensions in African countries tend to find expression in four persistently salient issue areas: (a) demand for redistributive policies and social policy, (b) region- and sector-specific development and regulatory policies, (c) land policy, where redistributive tensions and conflicts arise in the building of national land markets, and (d) issues around state structure and design (the territorial division of powers and prerogatives, as under federalism or decentralization). In most countries, regional cleavages trump class-like or interpersonal income inequalities as a driver of national contestation over issues of policy and collective choice. A 2x2 matrix predicts “regional preferences for decentralization and redistribution” based on a region’s relative economic standing and its political alignment with the center. South Africa, where regional inequality is lower and nationalizing institutions are stronger, is an outlier: Redistributive social policy is more developed than it is anywhere else in Africa, and the issue of national land market integration is less salient than it is in many African countries.

This chapter explores relationships between regional economic advantage and regional political advantage, making two arguments. The first is that relative political advantage among the regional electoral blocs tends to map onto the economic hierarchy of regions. This conforms to the theoretical expectation that politically dominant blocs tend to be economic leaders as well (see Gourevitch 1979). A corollary is that when relatively advantaged regions are out of power, they are likely to constitute a rival electoral bloc or an opposition-leaning zone. The second argument analyzes the formation of national winning electoral coalitions. Evidence from the 12-country study suggests that national electoral coalitions are built mainly via the ability of incumbent blocs to mobilize electoral support in constituencies in the weakly organized non-bloc areas. The most common alliance structure is alliances of the extremes (richest and poorest regions) against the middle. Similar patterns of alliance have been noted for countries cleaved by high spatial inequalities in other parts of the world. These coalition patterns tend to reproduce regionalism in national politics.

This chapter situates this book’s conceptual and theoretical approach with respect to earlier work on ethnicity and region in African countries and beyond. Earlier work has looked away from regional economic inequality as a political force in Africa, defaulting to theories centered on ethnicity, understood as a force orthogonal to programmatic policy interests and devoid of economic ideology. This work inverts these arguments, showing that regional economic inequalities and differentiation give rise to political cleavage and divergent policy interests. In Africa, the sources of subnational (regional) economic difference and inequality lie in unevenness of natural endowment, regionally specific patterns of state intervention in the economy that date to the colonial period, spatial–sectoral differentiation, and administrative structure. This chapter follows Lipset and Rokkan (1967) in theorizing the sources and nature of regional cleavages that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. It identifies institutions that contribute to the “regionalization” of national economies and politics in African countries. Section 2.5 of this chapter lays out the main elements of an approach to the analysis of regionalism that is fit for African contexts.

Does regional inequality give rise to political cleavages in African countries? If so, why and how? At what scale of politics? How do regional difference and inequality shape national politics and policy? The theory of regional politics advanced here is drawn from comparative politics theories of regional tensions that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. These are accentuated when socioeconomic inequality and territorial institutions align. This book argues that regional economic differentiation and spatial inequalities, in interaction with strongly territorial state institutions, shape politics and policy in African countries as they do in countries in other parts of the world. National economic integration and state-building activate subnational interests and fuel political tensions over the integration of subnational regions into the national polity and the national market. Regional economic and political heterogeneity and cross-regional inequalities shape both preferences and the relative bargaining power of subnational collectivities. These forces combine to produce persistent regional cleavage structures in national politics. Empirical support is drawn from electoral data from 44 elections across 12 countries, historical maps, and nighttime luminosity, household survey, and crop production data.

Regional interests and tensions are manifest in regional bloc voting in multiparty elections (1990s–2010s). We present an electoral geography analysis of constituency-level voting in presidential elections in twelve countries from 1990 to 2015 (44 elections). We describe the economic attributes of the electoral blocs using forty rounds of DHS surveys for geocoded education and ethnicity data, nighttime luminosity, historical maps of producer regions, and raster data for population densities and contemporary crop production profiles. Most electoral blocs arise in rural regions that are wealthier, better educated, more densely populated, and more deeply incorporated into the national economy than other rural areas. Most are specialized in high-value export crops (or traded food crops.) Some have nonagricultural production profiles as labor-exporting or mining regions. Most coalesce within provincial-level administrative units. Almost all are multiethnic. The evidence is consistent with the argument that state institutions work to channel politics arising from uneven economic development into the national political arena. Microlevel mechanisms contributing to this outcome are related to interests, organizations, ideology, and actions of political agents and coalition-builders.

This chapter identifies the colonial origins of the institutional structures and patterns of uneven economic development that create the template for political regionalism in African countries. Functional economic regions and administrative regions tended to align in African colonies, defining patterns of regional difference and inequality that are often strongly visible today. This process established frameworks within which politically salient ethnic identities developed, and defined political constituencies in territorial terms. With the 1940s emergence of colony-wide politics, existing administrative and political structures channeled regional interests and ideologies of regional consciousness into the national arena. A boundary persistence analysis underscores the large extent to which colonial territorial grids have been reproduced over time. I explain this persistence in terms of how African political leaders, social elites, farmers, and members of rural communities found advantage in territorial institutions forged under colonialism. These regional cleavages and the territorial institutions that help to reproduce them have structured patterns of national-level political competition in many African countries for many decades.

How regions emerge as political, social and economic entities, how they are conceptualized and how they come to provide a basis for identities around which political relations are configured are the major themes of this chapter. It includes an account of the idea of regional society in conceptualizing regional formations as well as attention to the role of area studies in the post-war period of decolonization and the Cold War. Also implicated in the emergence of area studies is the modernization paradigm that continues to underpin ideas about regional development in the global South. The final section addresses the framework for analysis offered by postcolonial approaches and suggests that the lens needs to be adjusted to take account of important instances of non-Western colonialism in Oceania while also offering a more critical perspective on the often taken-for-granted binaries of colonizer–colonized, domination–subordination, and repression–resistance.

Regional collaboration between states is increasingly vital to address the challenges of our time. Yet many regions struggle to collaborate effectively. Comparative regional law can contribute to effective regional collaboration. But it can also make a valuable contribution to the discipline of (comparative) law more generally, especially to rethinking the connection between law and the state, and better connecting our legal discipline to empirical methods. This contribution first sets out some key challenges for comparative regional law. For example, how to validly compare regions with vast and vital differences in history, (legal) culture, geography, language, and economies, and avoid pitfalls like EU-centrism or colonialism. As always in comparative law, no single perfect answer or method exists to address these challenges. Yet this contribution aims to help stock the comparative toolbox, so that researchers can pick and combine the proper methodological tools for the research questions they want to pursue. The main claim therefore is that, considering the nature of regional law, a functionalist method, complemented and checked by more critical methods, might often be a suitable approach. If done carefully, like two hedgehogs making love, comparing regional law can then produce academically and practically valuable results.

The chapter analyses how trade agreements balance liberalisation of digital trade with cybersecurity concerns. The chapter identifies the strengths, weaknesses, and ambiguities facing digital trade regulation in these agreements. As a way to address the tension between international trade law and cybersecurity, it examines security exception clauses in different trade agreements. It also analyses the efforts found in recent regional trade agreements to direct state parties to have regard to international standards concerning cybersecurity issues. It concludes that harmonisation of such standards would suggest the possibility of a greater coherence in cybersecurity governance.

The Introduction positions this book as part of the new critical move to map and interrogate crime fiction’s transnationality. The main point is to combine a sustained focus on individual texts and their particular local and national contexts with a broader, comparative approach that explores the ways in which the translation, circulation and reception of crime fiction within the Mediterranean basin produces a more complex portrait of the genre than would be possible if one just focused on national crime fictions as discrete entities. This chapter argues that by considering southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly giving each component equal significance, this book contributes to the debate about the Western and Eurocentric dimension of world literature. This introduction also argues that, for the relatively limited dimension of the region as opposed to the global, a regional approach is able to give close attention to particular languages and specific texts, while at the same time providing ‘peripheral literature’ with more critical mass and cultural power.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth century encompassed rapid political, social, and economic changes in the Atlantic world. The French Revolution and French expansionism under Napoleon Bonaparte accelerated the restructuring of the Hispanic world. Unfortunately, Spain had to navigate the challenging international period without the great enlightened monarch Carlos III (1759–1788), who had presided over a major intellectual transformation in the Spanish world. Ironically, for much of the period Spain and France cooperated to thwart British naval power in the Atlantic and its territorial ambitions in the Americas. The alliance devastated the Spanish economy and led to the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar.2 These disasters provoked public discontent, allowing anti-French factions in Spain to force the abdication of Carlos IV in March 1808. When Fernando VII became king, French troops were already on Spanish soil since his father had given Napoleon permission to cross Spain and occupy Portugal.

This chapter will provide the clarification of the origin, nature, and identify forms of political patronage in Vietnam. First, the authors present the origin of patronage in the context of Vietnamese culture and history; emphasizing the element of feudalism, Confucianism and culture-villageoise. After that, the authors analyze patronage appointments in contemporary Vietnamese politics, in light of its specific institutional dynamics. Finally, the chapter provides various typical case studies for the classification of patronage according to the models of Peters (2021).