Beyond Eurocentrism: Globalising and Decentring Research on Micro-Regional Cross-Border Cooperation

Research on cross-border micro-regionalism has proliferated in the last three decades. Much of this research is undertheorized and Eurocentric in outlook. Addressing this problem, our article follows calls to establish a Global International Relations research perspective that also incorporates non-Western cultural traditions and historical trajectories in theory building. We demonstrate that Hooghe and Marks's multi-level governance framework, while widely regarded as the dominant theoretical approach to studying cross-border cooperation (CBC) in Western Europe, proves significantly less applicable when extended beyond the European context. We argue that in combination with Comparative Area Studies approaches, reconciling cognitive and material perspectives may better accommodate non-Western CBC and identify Analytic Eclecticism and Practice Theory as promising avenues for a global, but at the same time decentred, theory-building on CBC. Methodologically, we opt for inductive and abductive qualitative approaches and Qualitative Comparative Analysis.