Introduction and Overview: The Study of New Regionalism(s) at the Start of the Second Decade of the Twenty-First Century

Analyses, as well as the policies and practices of ‘regionalism(s)’, are enjoying a renaissance. A variety of scholars from a diversity of analytical perspectives and existential regions seeks to capture and project heterogeneous forces both advancing and restraining regionalism at the turn of the present decade. ThisCompanion is symptomatic of the development and promise of the burgeoning field, which has been transformed from ‘first-wave’ formal, Eurocentric/European studies in the 1960s and 1970s (Cantori and Spiegel 1970) to comparative, global contrasts in what may be considered a ‘second wave’ (Wunderlich 2007, 4-5) over the last three decades.1 Revisionist laments at the end of the first decade of the new millennium (see Acharya 2007; Acharya and Johnston 2007) now seek to establish a conceptual ‘breakwater’ against the expanding breadth and scope of second-wave analyses.