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What brings together the cluster’s faculty participants, heterogeneous in disciplinary background and expertise, is a shared curiosity about the organization of the international system at a time of transition. The near-consensus view in academe, government, and the think tanks is that the post-Cold War unipolar moment under the tutelage of the United States is in the process of yielding to a multipolar world where leverage and leadership will be more widely distributed. The current scene is defined not solely by the prospect of a US retreat but also by the rise of Chinese influence and demands from the Global South as a whole for the needs of developing nations to be better served.
To say that multipolarity in some fashion is the wave of the future, though, raises the questions of how, exactly, roles might be allocated in it and how problems that transcend national borders are to be tackled. Aggregations defined by spatial adjacency—world regions—have often been pegged as crucial pieces of the puzzle. Recent decades, it has been observed, witness “a global proliferation of region building.” Although few would go far as to claim that regions and regionalism monopolize the scene, “regions are now everywhere across the globe and are increasingly fundamental to the functioning of all aspects of world affairs, from trade to conflict management.” Leading states pay more heed to regional realities, and advocates of systemic change routinely tie those realities to the coveted multipolarity.
World regions lie at the heart of our collaboration. Our aim is to build intellectual bridges between the study of regions, the evolution of the world system, and shared dilemmas of governance.
Speakers: Pol Antràs. Faculty Associate. Robert G. Ory Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Harvard University; Gary Gereffi. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Duke University.
Chairs: Timothy J. Colton, Co-Chair, Canada Program Faculty Steering Committee; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Regions in a Multipolar World; Faculty Associate; Harvard Academy Senior Scholar. Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies, Department of Government, Harvard University. Meg Rithmire, Co-Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Regions in a Multipolar World; Faculty Associate. Associate Professor of Business Administration, Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit, Harvard Business School.
Sponsors: RCC; Weatherhead Research Cluster on Regions in a Multipolar World.