Description
This chapter addresses the challenge of how to ‘do’ big picture research and theorizing about a contemporary international society characterized by “deep pluralism”, as Buzan argues. In so doing, it engages with the remarkable strand of Buzan’s work that has trained the spotlight on regions in international relations (most explicitly in Buzan and Waever 2003; Buzan and Gonzalez- Palaez 2009; Acharya and Buzan 2010 and 2019; Buzan and Zhang 2014; Buzan and Schouenborg 2018; Buzan and Goh 2020 – but in some way or other in the majority of his work).
The chapter first identifies and describes two central problems that arise for scholars wishing to take seriously Buzan’s injunction to perform historically-grounded, area studies-conversant, socially-focused IR research. First, how to theorize the ways in which contingent regional international societies interact with an evolving imagined international society? Second, how to access analytically the dualistic contemporary international society, which is neither sliding into a seamless globality nor clearly fragmenting into regions? It then explores two entry-points into pursuing meaningful ‘big picture’ research on regions within this context. The first entry-point is to build out the ‘social’ foundations of regions, introduced but not developed by Buzan. The second entry point is Buzan’s existing collaborative work of how regions relate to other regions and thereby shape global order (highlighted in the conclusion of Buzan and Acharya 2019). This section suggests a framework for connecting the quality and density of relationality among core world regions to evolutions in global order.
