Region: the geography of empire’s afterlives

Where histories sediment and futures contend.

Welcome.

Thank you for stopping by.

I'm Minah Kang, an international relations scholar based in Baltimore, working at the intersection of security studies, political geography, and postcolonial studies. I'm currently a PhD candidate in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

My research asks what comes into view when regional formation is placed at the center of the making of contemporary world politics, rather than treated as secondary to the consolidation of a world of nation-states and projects of national independence.

To answer this question, I examine the making of the Asia/Pacific region as both a terrain carved out through successive great-power contests over geopolitical order and a site where hierarchical arrangements fracture and post-imperial political possibilities are claimed and contested.

I trace how transborder infrastructures routed the movement of people and supplies while stitching disparate areas into a region; how international expert institutions made the region a unit of knowledge and governance; and how cross-border struggles over reparative justice for imperial-war violence challenged postwar settlements and liberal international norms.

My work draws on multilingual archival research and fieldwork across interconnected transpacific sites.