Description
This paper examines how “region” emerged as a critical scale for reordering the world since the interwar period. Focusing on the Institute of Pacific Relations (1925–1962), I analyze how the Asia/Pacific region came to be imagined and institutionalized not as a self-evident geographic container, but as a site of epistemic struggle—where imperial, anti-imperial, and nationalist actors articulated divergent claims about international order. I refer to this contested spatial formation as the geography of empire’s afterlives. Grounded in multi-site, multi-lingual archival research, the paper traces how the IPR institutionalized competing regional imaginaries through asymmetrical encounters among colonial and metropolitan actors. These imaginaries fed into—but also exceeded—the frameworks of wartime strategy and postwar settlement that would later shape international governance. By foregrounding region as a site of epistemic and geopolitical contestation, the paper challenges state-centric and universalist accounts of international order. It argues that the Asia/Pacific was not a passive recipient of global designs, but an active field where alternative internationalisms emerged alongside persistent imperial forms—a space where world-making was practiced through the contested grammar of regionalism.
