Process Geographies and a Fourth Wave of Area Studies

The aim of this paper is to bring together the concepts of process geographies (Appadurai, 1997) and topochrones (Houben, 2022)—innovative approaches that have emerged from the rich debates within New Area Studies. We argue that it is precisely these approaches in Area Studies that are needed to overcome the threat of a return to a polarised worldview in the context of today’s incipient Second Cold War (Schindler et al., 2023). The paper proceeds in three steps. First, we introduce the origins of the two conceptual terms process geographies and topochrones, which provide the analytical lens for our main argument. Second, we discuss the three waves of Area Studies (Sidaway, 2017) with a focus on the third wave, which took shape as New Area Studies under the conditions of post–Cold War liberalisation and globalisation. We argue that today the constitutive conditions for conducting Area Studies research have once again fundamentally shifted, passing a tipping point into what can aptly be described as a Second Cold War—one that threatens to push the discipline back into a pre-1990s configuration, risking its co-optation into the geopolitical logics of renewed global polarisation. We address Area Studies’ positioning vis-a-vis an assertive universalism on the one hand and a defensive universalism on the other hand. In a third step, we use the preceding reflections to empirically apply the concepts of topochrones and process geographies as analytical lenses and propose that these concepts offer a valuable foundation for a Fourth Wave of Area Studies rooted in emancipatory potential.