The grammars of globalisation and the languages of regionalism: The war in Ukraine as a milestone and a test

Multilateralism versus multipolarity

Since then, the erosion of the confidence in multilateralism has taken a variety of expressions. In Latin America, this went along with what was dubbed “post-hegemonic” regionalism (Riggirozzi and Tussie, 2012). In the United States, Donald Trump’s presidency brutally signalled a rehabilitation of protectionism: attacks were launched againt the WTO, membership of new regional agreements was stalled and, in the case of Nafta, forcibly renegotiated. International trade negotiations were also increasingly entangled with geopolitical considerations as the concept of the BRICs, initially a clever acronym coined in the aftermath of 9/11, morphed into the tangible expression of a multipolar world. By 2022, at the G20 Bali summit, the WTO director general, did not hide her concern at a breakdown of the global economy into rival trading blocs as she made a plea for rolling back “trade fragmentation” and “export restrictions on food, feed and fertilizers” (WTO, 2022).

In Europe and North America, the web of interdependencies associated with the globalisation of chains of production is nowadays perceived as a source of strategic vulnerabilities and insecurity. The trigger was the disruption of global supply chains during the Covid pandemic, soon followed by the mobilisation for renewable energy in order to combat climate change and, since 2022, the war in Ukraine. Belated awareness of the full implications of the “northstream 2 trap” (Van Renterghem, 2023) has also prompted a drastic reset of national, regional, and global policy agendas.

The days of the Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) subscript are over. The spillover effects of tensions with China also translate into policies designed to curtail interdependencies through “decoupling” (Manca, 2023) or, as in the case of the EU’s more selective approach, “de-risking” (Roy, 2023). Protectionism is back and thriving, in conjunction with public subsidies towards the promotion of strategic autonomy and reindustrialisation (Chu et al., 2023; Tagliapietra and Veugelers, 2023). Extensive reliance on fiscal incentives is also triggering new trade wars, including between industrialised economies. ³

The erosion of multilateralism is but one of the expressions of what is sometimes described as a retreat from globalisation or even a case of “deglobalisation” (Kupchan, 2023). Such a process can also be interpreted as a shift away from a phase of hyper globalisation.

The history of globalisation is associated with cycles (Lang, 2006) and this is already fuelling debates on the distinctive features and differentiated impact of the next phase (Loots, 2022; World Economic Forum, 2023). The analysis of world trade helps to sketch recompositions in the making. In industrialized economies, the regionalisation of global value chains “operates at the expense of their expansion towards China and other distant emerging countries” (Mouhoud, 2023: 35). In North America as in the EU, decarbonization, artificial intelligence and the digital revolution stimulate the transformation of manufacturing processes, consumer behaviour and the organisation of work. This entanglement of globalisation with fragmentation also breeds differentiated patterns of interactions in “authoritarian regimes, led by Russia, and middle-income oil and gas producing countries” (Mouhoud, 2023: 35). China, due to its economic power is boxing into a special category, with the result of an ability to promote alternative patterns of international governance.

Uti possidetis under pressure

In 2014, 2 days before the annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin stigmatized in a long speech, the dissolution of the Soviet Union that he described as follows:

[…] millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders. (Putin, 2014).

Russia, Putin lamented, was now a nation without a state, a depiction evocative of some of the post independence complaints in Africa. ⁴

Several years later, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, the implications of such a parallel were explicitly raised at the special UN Security Council meeting convened to discuss the situation in Ukraine. ⁵ The permanent representative of Kenya warned Russia of the dangers of stoking the “embers of dead empires” (Kenya, 2022). Our borders, he recalled were drawn

[...] with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart [...] At independence had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later.

The Kenyan representative could have also mentioned that the issue was still a source of tensions and polarisation in Africa. The Casablanca group, when it was founded in January 1961, favoured the establishment of a continental governance through the creation of a United States of Africa. The group also endorsed Moroccan claims over the territory of newly independent Mauritania. Great Morocco, it was argued, should be allowed to recover the pre-colonial territorial range of the medieval Almoravid empire from the eleventh and twelfth century (Banaś, 2020: 94; de la Serre, 1966). Conversely, the Monrovia group, established in May 1961, included Mauritania, and considered that African unity should endorse inherited colonial boundaries and strictly respect the sovereignty of independent states.

A consensus was finally reached, in 1963, at the founding conference of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa. The OAU charter endorsed the commitment of the Casablanca group to the liberation of the entire continent from colonialism and minority rule. It was, however, the Monrovia group’s functional and incremental approach to Pan-Africanism that was retained with respect to the conduct of relations between member-states (Wolfers, 1976).

The principle of strict respect of colonial boundaries was reiterated, a year later, at the first ordinary session of the OAU in Cairo (Declaration of Cairo). The intangibility of colonial boundaries, uti possidetis, was confirmed as an overarching normative precept for the conduct of the international relations of the member-states (Mnyongani, 2008). King Hassan II of Morocco, who was not at the meeting, eventually abandoned his country’s claims on the Mauritanian territory in 1969.

A few decades later, as the OAU became the African Union (AU), in 2002, the intangibility of colonial boundaries was reasserted, along with the principle of “non-interference of any member-state in the internal affairs of others” (African Union, 2000: 5). ⁶ By that time, however, the track-record of the pan-African organisation with respect to uti possidetis was still marred by a conflict with Morocco, this time over the decolonisation of the Spanish Sahara.

Morocco’s initially peaceful annexation of Western Sahara, in October 1975, interrupted plans towards the Spanish colony’s transition to independence. In the UN, however, this attempt to redraw colonial boundaries in the name of pre-colonial ties was not endorsed. In Africa too, the OAU voted in favour of a recognition of the independence of the disputed territory of Western Sahara. The move, in turn, prompted Morocco to suspend its membership of the OAU in 1984.

By the 2000s, the Western Sahara had achieved the status of “one of the world’s oldest and most neglected” crises, according to a detailed report released by the International Crisis Group (ICG, 2007; also Jensen, 2012). By the time the Kenyan representative delivered his UN Security Council speech in 2022, the Western Saharan was still a source of recurrent confrontations within the AU due to its ongoing recognition of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). Truly, Morocco had been readmitted as a full member of the AU in 2017, and in 2020, it had also secured from the Trump administration and Israel a recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. Yet, no resolution of the conflict was in sight within the AU or the UN. On 25 October 2023, the Security Council voted, as usual, the extension of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) for another year, while “calling on the parties to resume negotiations to achieve a just, lasting and mutually acceptable solution for the region” (UN, 2023).

As in the case of Morocco’s annexion of the Western Sahara, Putin’s claims to historical continuity build upon cognitive representations of the early history of Russia. This is meant to legitimize the invasion of an independent state that tsarist Russia and later the Soviet Union, contributed to shape through administrative fiat and coercion.

Amalgamation, hysteresis, and de/re-coupling

In Africa as in Latin America (Parthenay, 2021) and the Middle East (Fawcett, 2009), colonial rule was as much about partition as about region-building. Colonialism meant the establishment of boundary-lines that often cut across pre-existing polities (Bach, 2016: 10–31). The federations that were subsequently established by colonial rulers combined elements of centralisation and decentralisation classically associated with federalism, but key ingredients were missing: they were created without any consultation of the indigenous communities; nor were they sovereignty entities.

The term amalgamation was originally coined by the British in 1914, to characterise the administrative and financial decision to regroup distinct territories into a single entity, in this case Nigeria. This merger did not endorse any process of convergence rooted in pre-colonial histories. As a result, Nigeria began its existence as a “pure expression of imperialist political will” (Peel, 1983: 15).

Integration through hysteresis is a material and cognitive expression of the interplay between history and resilience within regional institutions (Parthenay, 2021: 31–41). The notion of hysteresis, usually associated with physics or economics, should be understood here as the continuation, in conjunction with processes of adjustment, renegotiation and legitimation, of arrangements crafted by colonial or imperial administrations (Bach, 2016: 13). Contemporary Africa offers two emblematic cases of integration through hysteresis: the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and the CFA Franc currency zone. Integration, in both cases; does not result from transfers of sovereignty. At independence, the countries involved merely had to agree to pursue pre-existing colonial arrangements. In practice, this meant that SACU and the CFA zone were (and are still) dominated and regulated by their former South African and French cores. ⁷

In the post-soviet space, it is through the image of railway (de)coupling that similar issues have been raised:

[…] the Soviet, later Russian, centre, is the engine. The carriages represent not so much the fourteen other republics as the issues that bind them to the centre – a legal system, the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Ruble, free trade, military security, shared history, and culture.” (Smith, 2019: 184)

Decoupling started with the restoration of the sovereignty and independence of the three Baltic states and Georgia between 1988 and 1991 (Smith, 2019: 184). The formal proclamation of the end of the Soviet Union went along with the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that, by 1993, included 11 out of the 14 former soviet states. ⁸

The stated purpose of the CIS was to curb the effects of the disintegration of the Soviet Union through the establishment of an integrated space, based on a free trade area, the establishment of a Eurasian economic union (EEU), a Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and even, in the case of Belarus and Russia, a Political Union (Smith, 2019: 184–5).

From the onset, the CIS project carried an intrinsic ambivalence since it involved states with substantial Russian diasporas (Souzlov, 2017). Multilayered identities and territorial contiguity could therefore create a potentially fertile turf for the expression of Russian irredentism. Imperial and Soviet policies had extensively redrawn frontiers and reshaped identities, if need be, through the authoritarian displacement of (indigenous) peoples. Ethnic Russians had equally been affected by policies that claimed to resolve the ‘national questions’ (De Stefano, 2019).

The disintegration of the post-soviet space was, initially, relatively peaceful compared with the experience of European colonial empires. Imperial deconstruction and the emergence of new statehoods were dampened for “at least a generation” by “[…] economic ties, transportation and logistics, infrastructure, standards of education science culture, and most importantly […] the mentality of the political and business élites.” (Kortunov, 2022) In addition to this, only a small fraction of the borders between the former Soviet Republics had been demarcated, with the result that “none of the newly independent states were able to exert effective control over their own borders” (Mattheis et al., 2019: 49).

As Crimea was about to be invaded, the atmosphere was completely different. Putin lamented that “Many people, both in Russia and in Ukraine, as well as in other republics, hoped that the CIS […] would become the new common form of statehood […] However, all this remained empty promises” (Putin, 2014). The CIS turned to be more about trying to alleviate the effects of decoupling than about the promotion of supranational integration. Putin had failed to hold the majority of post-Soviet States together (Smith, 2022: 3) and Russian claims to hegemony were being contested by the prospects of further EU and NATO extension into Russia’s ‘near abroad’ (Toal, 2017).

The military aggressions of Ukraine, in 2014, and again in 2022, have been interpreted as an expression of the Russian frustration generated by these past developments (Grigas, 2016; Smith, 2022). They are a reminder that amalgamation, once exclusively associated with the constitution of imperial and colonial blocs is equally suitable to describe policies designed to revert to imperial maps and frontiers.

Region-building as sovereignty or regime enhancement

Unlike the notion of regional integration, regionalism has no difficulty to account for agendas that, as in case of APEC or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) seek to consolidate state power through sovereignty enhancement as opposed to sovereignty pooling (Higgot, 1998: 52–3).

In Eurasia, the CSTO was originally conceived as the nemesis of NATO, ⁹ and meant to promote both sovereignty and regime enhancement. In effect, the project has been marred by Russia’s inability to meet the ambitious expectations endorsed in the treaty (Deyermond, 2018). The CSTO, in addition to its checkered record and a fluctuating membership (Russo, 2018: 5) has suffered from the unreliability of the very country meant to confer credibility to the organisation. This capabilities expectations gap has also kept widening with Russia’s failure to mediate in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.

This is in sharp contrast with China’s unfaltering commitment to territorial integrity and (authoritarian) regime enhancement within another Eurasian, regional organisation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The establishment of the SCO followed a succession of confidence-building initiatives. Negotiations were initially focused, during the 1990s, on the resolution of Sino-Soviet territorial disputes inherited by newly independent Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (Russo, 2018: 195–6). Treaties were then concluded towards a “Deepening [of] Military Trust in Border Regions” (1996) and the “Reduction of Military Forces in Border Regions” (1996) The Dushanbe conference, held in 2000, subsequently endorsed the principle of strict non-intervention “in other countries’ internal affairs on the pretexts of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘protecting human rights’ [sic].” Participants also strongly reiterated on that occasion their commitment to the stability of their respective regimes (Bates, 2001).

The governance of the SCO is a reminder of the so-called ASEAN-way of doing things – namely, decision-making processes that “favour a high degree of consultation and consensus,” with strict respect for national sovereignty, as well as “discreteness, informality and non-confrontational bargaining styles” (Acharya, 2001: 64).

The modest forum designed to promote inter-state negotiations within a loosely institutionalised framework (Russo, 2018: 196), has considerably expanded its membership and diversified away from initially stated goals. Today these range from military cooperation and counterterrorism to plans towards a free trade area that is due to become an integral part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Alimov, 2018: 114–124).

Holistic and developmental regionalism: the EU as ‘the’ model

Throughout the 1990s, the assumption that the focus on new forms of regionalism meant that the EU would become an outdated model of region-building never materialized. The global revival of regionalism in the 1990s actually owed much to the EU’s completion of a Single European Market (SEM), the adoption of the Maastricht treaty and the enlargement of the EU towards eastern and central Europe (Hettne, 1994: 12). Through active or passive support to region-building, the EU subsequently consolidated its status as the global script for integration (Libman, 2019: 247; Lenz, 2021: 1–17).

Since then, the EU’s integrative power, both within and beyond its frontiers, has been sustained through the pragmatic resolution of a stream of crises. Calls for a functional theory of (European) disintegration (Schmitter and Lefkofridi, 2016) have also proved to be unnecessary. European cohesion was undented during the protracted Brexit negotiations towards the Trade and Cooperation agreement signed on 30 December 2021 (Barnier, 2021).

In Latin America, it is the EU’s aura as a model that informed the establishment of Mercosur in 1991. In the Asia-Pacific region, EU common policies and innovations in the field of governance also inspired ASEAN, despite significantly different institutional goals and architectures (Jetschke, 2010). It was, however, in Africa that the imprint of the EU was to be most significant. By the turn of the 21st century, the constitutive act of the AU and the new (or renewed) treaties of six out of the eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs) were heavily inspired by the EU. This trend was partly an expression of the EU’s soft power within the Lome Convention and its successor, the Cotonou Agreement. In addition, dedicated regional development cooperation funding increased rapidly following the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht.

The track-record of the EU created a genuine sense of convergence at a time when the revival of the ideals of Pan-Africanism was expected to produce broader and more ambitious agendas. Since 1958, the EU had successfully managed to enhance its market integration and implementation of common policies in an increasing number of areas. By the mid-1990s, the SEM was completed and the transition towards the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was well on track. Structural funds helped to curb disparities within the union and ensure the redistribution of some of the costs and benefits of integration among members. In contrast with the neo-liberal agenda that prevailed in North America and the Asia-Pacific, the EU offered an empirical illustration of what a holistic, integrated, and developmental trajectory could involve (Bach, 2016: 111–112).

Across the world, the emulation of the EU is still frequently confined to the expression of aspirational agendas (Weiffen, 2021: 27). Progress in the field of integration is nonetheless achieved through innovative procedures. In West Africa, for instance, the Commission of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and its member-states have, over the years established working relations based on the combination of inter-governmentalism with institutional delegation (Müller, 2023).

Within the post-soviet space, a tribute fraught with ambivalence was paid to the EU as a model when, on 29 May 2014, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU or EEU) was signed by Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. About a year later, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan joined this attempt to reinvigorate a project that could be traced back to a pledge of the CIS to counter the dissolution of the Soviet Union through the formation of common European and Eurasian markets (Čanji and Kazharski, 2022: 568).

The EAEU was meant to emulate the EU model of integration while being its nemesis (Staeger, 2017). It was expected that the EAEU would be able to compete with and seek recognition from the EU in contested neighbourhoods (Libman, 2019: 253). Despite this ambitious agenda, by the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reality of integration among the EAEU-5 was “uneven and patchy” (Chatham House, 2022: 1; Yeliseyeu, 2019): the powers of its “Commission,” meant to emulate its EU eponym, were limited; most of the trade, if one excepts hydrocarbons, took place between Russia and each of the member-states. Along with this hub-and-spoke pattern, unilateralism often prevailed.

For Russia, achieving the global ambitions assigned to the EAEU was premised on securing Ukraine’s participation in the union (Dragneva and Wolczuk, 2017: 10). The annexation of Crimea, and the punitive measures that were simultaneously unleashed against Ukraine, in 2014, were the direct result of what Torbakov (2019: 46) bluntly summarizes as “the Kremlin being hell bent on bringing Kyiv into the Eurasian fold.” This did not stall the establishment of closer relations between Ukraine and the EU. 8 years later, following the invasion of Ukraine, the country’s prospects for membership of the EU entered a new phase, with the decision of the European Council to confer ‘candidate status’ to Ukraine and Moldova (European Council, 2022).

(De)fragmentation and connectivity

The revival of regionalism in the 1990s was commonly associated with APEC’s model of trade liberalisation through nationally anchored, and domestically driven policy reforms. The elimination of import quotas, non-tariff barriers and customs duties stimulated cross border interactions between entrepreneurial diasporas and corporate players (Ravenhill, 2001). The surge and expansion of Global Value Chains (GVCs) also gathered momentum, usually with China as the driving force following its entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

Progress towards ‘deep’ or deeper global integration was then sustained through policies designed to improve the business climates in developing economies (Baldwin, 2011: 16). A new generation of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and Bilateral Investment Treaties emerged. These were meant to go beyond WTO obligations with respect to services, competition policy, investment, technical barriers and regulatory compatibility, intellectual property protection, etc. This, it was assumed, would iron out differences in investment and business climates (Meléndez-Ortiz, 2014: 13).

It was in this context that the metaphor of defragmentation was first suggested (World Bank, 2012: xv), a reference to the computer world where the ‘defrag’ function aims to restore and speed up hard disk efficiency by consolidating programs scattered in different locations. As in the case of deep integration, the logics of defragmentation intrinsically postulate the dilution of the frontiers between national, regional and global integration, along with the adoption of leaner, functionally driven, institutional architectures. This template was viewed as an alternative to the establishment of regional organisations meant to promote integration through transfers or delegations of sovereignty. Defragmentation was also closely correlated with connectivity, a knock-on effect of developments in the field of mobile cellular technologies.

Although the grammars within which FTAs are encased have been drastically transformed, the stream of new FTAs has not abated (World Bank, 2023). In Africa the Kigali treaty, signed in 2018, prescribes the establishment of an African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). In Asia and the Pacific, negotiations towards a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) meant to broaden ASEAN’s web of free trade agreements, were successfully completed in 2020. The RCEP is, at least formally, the largest free trade areas worldwide, with 15 member-states accounting for a third of world trade (Harding and Reed, 2020). The drive towards broadened regional agreements also proceeds through interregional FTAs, as in the case of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR)-SACU agreement or the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA).

Defragmentation and interconnectivity agendas were associated in the 1990s with the revival of investment into conventional ‘hard’ infrastructures such as dams, bridges, railways and harbours. Following the financial crisis of 2008–9, some of these investments were, especially in Europe, frozen. Equally significant has remained the investment into ‘soft’ infrastructures, in conjunction with digital technologies, including, more recently, Artificial Intelligence (Kugonza and Mugalula, 2020). China’s new silk roads concept, known today as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been a trailblazer in this respect.

Launched in 2013, the BRI has turned into the world’s largest-ever transnational infrastructure investment programme. Chinese investment into cross-regional infrastructures contributes to weaving hub-and-spoke interactions between China and a string of harbours, free trade zones, transport corridors and nodes that span well beyond the topography of the old silk roads. The construction projects and investments that have been carried out by Chinese companies in 152 countries amount to over $1tn in cumulative terms (Kuo and Kommenda, 2018; White, 2023).

The post-Soviet states of central Asia were located, from the onset, at the heart of China’s stated ambition to reconnect Asia to Europe by land. Not surprisingly, therefore, what was to be known as “the Silk Road Economic Belt” was first mentioned by Xi Jinping in the speech that he delivered, in September 2013, at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan (Shakhanova and Garlick, 2020: 34).

In the case of the EAEU, interactions with the BRI were initially fraught with geoeconomic concern at China’s increasing international presence. In May 2015, Putin had offered to “coordinate” the EAEU’s plans towards economic integration within the BRI (Shakhanova and Garlick, 2020: 34). Strikingly, however, the strategic documents that were subsequently adopted by the EAEU neither referred to the BRI nor to China’s role within Putin’s idea of a Greater Eurasian Partnership (GEP). The message that was delivered was devoid of any ambiguity: “Russia strives to stay a leader in the region, capable of intercepting the Chinese economic impulse and contain it in the Eurasian framework” (Shakhanova and Garlick, 2020: 34; also, Christoffersen, 2018: 447). The trade and economic agreement that was finally concluded, in May 2018, between China and the EAEU, characteristically refrained from establishing a free trade regime with China. It merely restated “the intentions of both sides to cooperate on trade facilitation and technical regulation in the future” (Shakhanova and Garlick, 2020: 40). The most tangible outcome was the establishment of a list of investment projects eligible to BRI and EAEU support.

Then came COVID and not much later the invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions. Russia and its neighbours had to seek alternative transport routes, identify new sources of supply and market outlets. The result was a deepening asymmetry in their trade relations with China. A new relationship with China also emerged with the announcement of a ‘no-limits’ partnership between Putin and Xi Jinping. At the third BRI forum, held in Beijing on 17–18 October 2023, Putin reiterated his pledge towards the EAEU ‘pairing’ with the BRI, but now described his GEP project, as a ‘local’ or regional initiative, which could not match with the BRI’s ‘global’ scope (Kaczmarski and Kuhrt, 2023).

In the Chinese white paper released before the meeting, the BRI was presented as “the world’s largest platform for international cooperation” and a tool towards the promotion of alternative forms of governance through “policy coordination, infrastructure connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and closer people-to-people ties” (PRC, 2023). As the forum met, emphasis was not so much on large infrastructure projects, ¹⁰ as on broad and expanding goals. These are already translating into policies designed to secure control over supply chains of critical minerals (Kynge, 2023). More generally, the BRI is meant to improve China’s economic self-reliance and promote its own model of international governance.

Xi Jingping’s signature project, it has been suggested, may turn into a quintessential expression of a PRC’s grand strategy within a multipolar and fragmented international order (Beeson, 2022: 6; Herrero, 2023).

The BRI’s rise as a vehicule for Chinese influence has triggered reactions, as illustrated by the launch of the EU’s Global Gateway Initiative (GGI) in 2021. ¹¹ The GGI, like the BRI, combines defragmentation (through its emphasis on infrastructure development) with increasingly explicit geoeconomic and strategic consideration. In the process, it is the ‘old’ debate between regionalism as a stepping stone and regionalism as a stumbling bloc, or a buffer, that is being revived.

The lure of the frontier: regionalisation without region-building

Regionalisation without region-building refers to processes that are network-driven and thrive from the exploitation of distortions and disparities that materialise in the borderlands (Bach, 2003). The outcome is an asymptomatic expression of the interplay between regionalism and regionalisation. The formation of regional spaces is not associated with “states as drivers, regional organisations as locus and formal projects as embodiment” (Mattheis et al., 2019: 1–2); this, also, and most importantly, contributes to the sharp contrast between spaces and actors deemed marginal, and the broad implications of their practices (Mattheis et al., 2019: 1–2).

What has been described as patterns of trans-state regionalisation refers to the infusion of trans-national with inter-state patterns of interaction. The neologism encapsulates the cross-border networks’ capacity to penetrate the territory of the states as much as their institutions. Whenever the porosity of frontiers combines with a particularly weak state ability to produce and enforce public policies, state or policy capture may arise. West Africa’s ‘warehouse’ states (Benin, Togo, the Gambia, Niger) still offer an emblematic illustration of this trend (Igué and Soulé, 1993). State capture can also proceed in conjunction with violent and predatory forms of control, as in the case of the Central African Republic’s transformation into a hub for the deployment of the activities of the Wagner group (The Sentry, 2023).

Transstate networks may fear the effects of a militarization of the border, but they equally resent the dismantlement of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Trans-state regionalisation, in contrast with flows and networks associated with trade facilitation initiatives, thrives from the preservation of existing state boundaries, and rests upon the establishment of complicities within states bureaucracies and in the borderlands (Bach, 2003). The integrative power of trans-state networks, often celebrated as an expression of bottom-up regionalisation, simultaneously constitutes an impediment to trade facilitation initiatives (Walther, 2022). As interconnectivity stimulates the dilution between local, regional and global flows, borderlands adjust to opportunities that range beyond commodities and consumer goods, as they include cigarettes, drugs trade, arms, children or migrants’ trafficking.

Transstate regionalisation is also prone to be entangled with the instrumentalisation of violence, wars and insecurity in the borderlands and beyond. In Georgia, Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatism and the related establishment of de facto boundary-lines, creates opportunities for “everyday transgressions of border regimes” (Mattheis et al., 2019: 59) Accordingly, the petty trading and smuggling activities of internally displaced persons coexist with large scale trafficking networks that secure the protection of law enforcement officials and border-guards (Khukhianidze, 2004: 91–96; Mattheis et al., 2019: 60). The combination of state weakness with violence and unresolved conflicts contribute to shape spaces that are mobile, socially defined, and antagonistic to institutionally driven regional agendas.

The porous and unsettled borders of the independent states born out of the Soviet Union offer a fertile ground for the production of regional spaces that cut across territorially identities and boundaries. This does not intrinsically constitute an incentive to redrawing boundaries, but the instrumentalization of regionalist claims can never be excluded whenever ideational representations combine with the rise of irredentist claims, driven by neighbouring states (Grigas, 2016).