From the series of interesting questions posed by the editors for this volume to celebrate UNU-CRIS, I have chosen to address how we conceptualise discourses of regionalism as they evolve over time, how they grow in and out of fashion and the implications that this has for the practice of regionalism by the principal regional actors. I do this via embedding a case study of the change from a “discourse of the Asia–Pacific” to a “discourse of the Indo-Pacific” in the wider international context, specifically observing the changing fortunes of economic globalisation and geopolitics as hegemonic narratives of global and regional order. I show how we are witnessing a declining interest in the geo-economics of the Asia–Pacific as the regional hosting metaphor and the rising focus on the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific as the regional hosting neologism that reflects the current wider hegemonic narrative and the subsequent intensification of the great power competition between the USA and China.