Since the collapse of the postwar Italian party system in 1992-3, Italian politics has been dominated by the figure of Silvio Berlusconi, undoubtedly the major politician on the political center-right and elected as prime minister successively in 1994, 2001, and 2008. The image of Berlusconi as Italy’s political leader is often seen by commentators as much more positive at home than it has been abroad. Some well known foreign media, for example, have been much more consistently negative about Berlusconi’s dual role as media baron and political leader than have domestic media (and considerable public opinion) in Italy. If so, then Berlusconi’s exit from a central position in Italian politics may create external relief that he is gone and improved regard for Italy as a whole but at the expense of a huge “hole” that his absence may create domestically. On close analysis, however, The presumed gap between views of Berlusconi at “home” and “abroad” looks smaller, however, than conventional wisdom would suggest. At least over the recent course of his political career, he has stimulated a similar range of increasingly attitudinal negative responses both in Italy and elsewhere, although with variations over time everywhere and from place to place outside of Italy. These responses are increasingly negative, both at home and abroad. Berlusconi’s reputation is very much related to popular perceptions of his practical successes and failures as a leader and to what sort of leader he has actually been. It is not simply the result of a “battle” of media images without substantive content. This is encouraging news for those looking towards a future in which Italian politics will be less dominated by popular media such as television and its presumed manipulation of a totally pliant electorate. The exit of the “big seducer” will leave a troubling legacy of unresolved problems while also creating openings for a political future in which Italians may be more collectively invested.

Margins are central rather then peripheral to defining political identities. Italian national identity, though often seen as a fragile construct, is by no means unique in this regard. National identities must be constantly in question in order to thrive. Three geopolitical moments or forces are identified as having contributed at different times and in distinctive ways to the spatial construction of Italian identity: the border question, the immigrant/emigrant experience, and the North-South regional division.

China’s twenty-first century economic rise has had a powerful impact on the lives of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities living in its Western Region, the administrative region composed of China’s Inner Asian border provinces. Urbanization in this region is reshaping the lives and livelihoods of erstwhile farmers and pastoralists moving to urban environments. The state hopes to decrease ethnic tension through economic development and the enrollment of all frontier peoples into the national consumer economy. In light of this situation, this dissertation asks: are Tibetans’ lives and livelihoods changing for better or for worse? Focusing on one exemplary city in this region, I argue that despite increased material prosperity, ethnic differences have been exacerbated as perceptions about unequal access to work and ethnic discrimination have proliferated. Urbanization has led to great changes in the economy, the built environment, and communications technology that influence how Tibetans come to belong in the city.

This dissertation uses two approaches to investigate what is behind these changes. First, I use discourse analysis of Chinese public intellectuals and policy changes to show how the Chinese state conceives of the Western Region as a state development project. The imagination of these frontier provinces relies on culturalist narratives of progress and civilization. Concerns about the domestic economy and geopolitics also drive the historical looking backwards and economic looking outwards that shapes contemporary discourse about the frontiers. Moreover, I find that representations of frontier peoples - in historical geography, politics, and in popular culture - often elide the voices of ethnic groups that inhabit China’s Western Regions.

Second, I use ethnography, interviews, and analysis of urban imagery and social media posts to show how Tibetans and Muslims come to live in Xining City, the provincial capital of Qinghai Province located on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The changes occurring in the city are exemplary of the urbanization that is affecting all of China’s minority ethnicities. The frontier economy is changing livelihoods. It also remains unstable and dependent upon policy makers in Beijing. The transition to urban life is pushing Tibetans to envision new relationships with the city, the countryside, and even their own self-identities, as they seek to become urbane citizens and retain their ethnic identity. Tibetans also struggle to place-make, contributing sites of worship and ethnic particularity in an urban environment organized into urban territories that privilege Han Chinese urban landscapes. The Hanness of frontier urbanization contributes to ethnic difference in other ways as well, as revealed in Xining Tibetans’ social media narratives about ethnic stigma and surveillance in the wake of terrorist attacks across China in 2014.

The concept of regions, segments of the Earth's surface, and the process of regionalization, identifying regions, are potentially useful but in need of reexamination. The meaning of 'region', the nature of regions, and the conventionality of existing regions are the main issues addressed.

Our understanding of the world is heavily influenced by conventional geographies. Humans naturally break the world into classes to understand it, including subdividing the Earth into regions. Regions can be studied directly, but are used mostly to identify the setting of events and experience. At the global scale, we primarily use countries. Additionally, geography, area studies, and other fields are increasingly organized around world regions. The convention that defines these regionalizations and by which we employ them has left the public and even social scientists operating in a mental world at odds with empirical reality.

The conventional understanding of regions is that they are or should be standardized, authoritative or official, exhaustive and exclusive, hierarchical, and bounded. The conventional global regionalizations possess all five properties, and all are problematic. Also critiqued here are the distinction between formal and functional regions, the newer preference for process geographies over trait geographies, and the privileged status of place.

Our substitute for conventional regions should primarily be regions defined by single, empirical attributes of the human, natural, or physical world, attributes most relevant to the subject under consideration; this will produce multiple independent systems of regions, in which regions, and regionalizations, will be parallel, occupying the same space. Examined carefully here are political regionalization, considering the juridical state, sovereignty, and territoriality in international relations, and linguistic regionalization, considering the identification of languages versus dialects, and Ethnologue. World regions at their best point to numerous geographically-concentrated commonalities, often linked to an original civilization and spread through religion or empire; these can be taken simultaneously to define a superregion, comprising a core where all commonalities are present, and a periphery where only one is. South Asia and Latin America are considered briefly as possible superregions; East Asia is considered in detail, with the culture of China as its base.