Theorising global IR through regional peripheries: Southeast Asia between civilisations, empires and great powers

Abstract

Global International Relations (IR) seeks to move beyond Eurocentric perspectives by advancing the study of diverse regional histories and world orders. Yet, despite these aspirations, much of IR scholarship continues to revolve around regional cores – civilisations, empires and great powers. I argue that a truly global IR requires a conscious shift away from such centric worldviews by redirecting the disciplinary gaze towards ‘regional peripheries’. Defined as active zones that occupy the interstices between regional cores, regional peripheries maintain partial, indirect and historically variable connections to political centres – whether material, institutional, discursive or epistemic. As such, they offer critical vantage points for analysing how world orders emerge, fracture and transition. This corrective emphasis is not a re-centring of peripheries as fully agentic order-makers; it is intended to make the relational constitution of order at core-periphery interfaces analytically visible. Using Southeast Asia as an illustrative case of a regional periphery positioned between the East Asian and Indian Ocean worlds, I identify two pathways through which regional peripheries recalibrate order: by marking the boundaries of core-led orders, where authority weakens due to core inattention; and by functioning as intermediary nodes that connect disparate regional cores. I develop a typology of three strategic orientations – bandwagoning, consolidation and decentring – to analyse how peripheral actors recalibrate the trajectories of order.