Author: John Agnew.

One of the purposes of this journal is to respond to and provide a publishing outlet for research on the politics of regional development and multilevel governance. Studying the political economy of regions within countries has expanded considerably in recent years. More speci fi cally, from the perspective of this journal, the political in the political economy of regions has lost its subsidiary status to that of economy. At the same time, studying the politics of regions or regionalism has also undergone some major changes. One of the most notable is the resituating of regions within global and continental con- texts (e.g. A GNEW 2013;H OOGHE and M ARKS 2001). Globalization and the growth of supranational agencies and agreements are seen as exacerbating rather than attenuating regional differences and in turn eliciting signi fi cant political responses ranging from popular protests through regional competition policies to, in a few cases, the threat and then the reality of regional secession. This can be construed as part of the ‘ territory debordering territoriality ’ referred to by S ASKIA S ASSEN (2013) in which territory can be seen as de fi ning vectors not monopolized by the borders of particular states or, in a different formulation, that legal jurisdiction and the organizational structures (of various public and private actors) are not restricted to state territories.