This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation. The overarching objective of the book is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in the analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The authors—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the USA—explicitly go beyond the perspective of an entity defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The research project that led to the composition of the book combined quantitative (statistical surveys conducted across Ukraine) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus-group discussion) methods. The authors came to the conclusion that regionalism as a defining phenomenon of Ukraine is more prominent than the regions themselves. This approach regards Ukraine as a construct in flux where different discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge through the lenses of various disciplines and methodologies.

Regions are difficult to govern – coordinating policies across local jurisdictional boundaries in the absence of a formal regional government gives rise to enormous challenges. Yet some degree of coordination is almost always essential for local governments to effectively fulfill their responsibilities to their citizens. State and local governments have, over time, awkwardly, and with much experimenting, developed common approaches to regional governance. In this revolutionary new book, authors David Miller and Jen Nelles offer a new way to conceptualize those common approaches: Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (RIGOs) that bring together local governments to coordinate policies across jurisdictional boundaries. RIGOs are not governments themselves, but as Miller and Nelles demonstrate, they do have a measure of political authority that allows them to quietly and sometimes almost invisibly work to further regional interests and mitigate cross-boundary irritations. Providing a new conceptual framework for understanding how regional decision-making has emerged in the U.S., this book will provoke a new and rich era of discussion about American regionalism in theory and practice. Discovering American Regionalism will be a future classic in the study of intergovernmental relations, regionalism, and cross-boundary collaboration.

Regions. How they emerge and how they are dramatically changing the appearance of the present 'world of states' and its related forms of governance from local to global levels is analysed in this monograph. But what are regions? Regions can be small or huge. They can be part of a single state, be composed out of different states or stretched out across borders. They can be important recognized economic, social or cultural entities or they can be largely ignored by the people who live on a region's territory. They can be well-defined with clear cut boundaries as is the case in so-called 'constitutional regions' or they can be fuzzy as for instance in cross-border regions. In sum, they are not a natural kind and defining regions is not a simple task. Luk Van Langenhove advances the concept of region building as an alternative to the construction of regions with three issues of region building being explored: - Why are regions built in a world of states? - How do region building processes take place? - How are regions transforming the present world order? Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book is an exercise in theorizing regions and brings together under one conceptual framework, different processes and concepts such as regional integration, devolution, federalism, and separatism and refines the social constructionist view on regions

This book examines why regional identities are stronger in some regions than in others, and discusses the underlying causes of the mobilization of sub-state regions in Western Europe over the past fifty years.

This book was first published in 1947.

Since the late 1980s, there has been a global upsurge of various forms of regionalist projects. The widening and deepening of the European Union (EU) is the most prominent example, but there has also been a revitalization or expansion of many other regionalist projects as well, such as the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). More or less every government in the world is engaged in regionalism, which also involves a rich variety of business and civil society actors, resulting in a multitude of regional processes in most fields of contemporary politics. In this new text, Fredrik Söderbaum draws on decades of scholarship to provide a major reassessment of regionalism and to address questions about its origins, logic and consequences. By examining regionalism from historical, spatial, comparative and global perspectives, Rethinking Regionalism transcends the deep intellectual and disciplinary rivalries that have limited our knowledge about the subject. This broad-ranging approach enables new and challenging answers to emerge as to why and how regionalism evolves and consolidates, how it can be compared, and what its ongoing significance is for a host of issues within global politics, from security and trade to development and the environment. Retaining a balanced and authoritative style throughout, this text will be welcomed for its uniquely comprehensive examination of regionalism in the contemporary global age.

The idea of "region" in America has often served to isolate places from each other, observes Douglas Reichert Powell. Whether in the nostalgic celebration of folk cultures or the urbane distaste for "hicks," certain regions of the country are identified as static, insular, and culturally disconnected from everywhere else. In Critical Regionalism, Reichert Powell explores this trend and offers alternatives to it. Reichert Powell proposes using more nuanced strategies that identify distinctive aspects of particular geographically marginal communities without turning them into peculiar "hick towns." He enacts a new methodology of critical regionalism in order to link local concerns and debates to larger patterns of history, politics, and culture. To illustrate his method, in each chapter of the book Reichert Powell juxtaposes widely known texts from American literature and film with texts from and about his own Appalachian hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee. He carries the idea further in a call for a critical regionalist pedagogy that uses the classroom as a place for academic writers to build new connections with their surroundings, and to teach others to do so as well.