Mapping against asymmetry: power asymmetry and divergent region-making strategies in the Indo-Pacific

Four middle powers inhabiting the same geographic space have constructed four fundamentally different approaches to mapping regions in the Indo-Pacific, each with distinct boundaries, membership criteria, and distributional consequences. By examining Australia’s boundary expansion, Indonesia’s focus on institutional centrality, South Korea’s anchored rotation, and Japan’s selective node insertion, this article demonstrates that each strategic pathway responds to a distinct form of power asymmetry: exclusion, institutional marginalisation, geopolitical vulnerability, and frontline exposure. Despite their differences, the four pathways share a common underlying logic: actors use the definition of ‘the region’ to mitigate the power disparities that constrain them. The article conceptualises this logic as anti-asymmetry regionalism. Within structurally asymmetric systems, non-apex actors function not merely as passive recipients of great-power regionalism but as active agents who recalibrate the spatial dimensions of regional cooperation to mitigate structural imbalances. Integrating asymmetry into regionalism theory addresses puzzles of why institutional proliferation exceeds what bipolar competition alone can produce, and why actors with limited material capabilities exercise disproportionate influence over regional architecture. More importantly, it reveals that the actors best positioned to shape that architecture are not necessarily the most powerful but the most effective in their region-mapping strategies. The margins of power, in other words, produce the region.