Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Comparative regionalism as a field of enquiry has made great strides in showing the relevance of regional organizations and inter-regional dynamics in world politics, and the influence of the European Union (EU) on regionalism elsewhere in the world (Acharya, 1997; Ba, 2009; Dri, 2010; Jetschke and Lenz, 2013; Lenz and Burilkov, 2017). However, only rare attempts have been made to theorize and conceptualize regional organizations from the perspective of African peoples, which has led to the loss of important insights for the field (for recent exceptions, see Souaré, 2014; Tieku, 2017, 2019; Coleman and Tieku, 2018; Witt, 2019; Glas and Balogun, 2020; Ng, 2021). Conventional constructivist and English School conceptualizations such as security community, regional security complex, and regional international society are Eurocentric and do not meaningfully explicate the fundamental dynamics of regional organizations in Africa (Mumford, 2020, 2021). This chapter offers an alternative conceptualization of regional organizations that incorporates African experiences of the international and their agency in shaping regional politics. The key assertion is that formal regional organizations in Africa are best conceptualized as instruments to build a regional community that will empower African states vis-à-vis the European ‘Other’. A subsequent discourse analysis takes seriously the agency of post-independence leaders as they create regional organizations to alleviate their insecurities about interference from former colonial powers. To show that African experiences can also enrich wider scholarship in the field, the chapter clarifies how the conceptualization adopted here addresses two fundamental problems of comparative regionalism.
The first problem I present as vertical – how to conceptualize the relationship between a region and a regional organization (or a similar discussion, see Hurrell 2007: 130).
In part thus, the division has been one between those who crave knowledge in the form of universal propositions and discount the merit of ‘mere description’, and those who revere the unending uniqueness of human experiences and see mainly empty words in abstract formulations. (Pye, 1975: 6)
In the course of my daily duties as an academic, I am often approached by international relations (IR) students asking me how I learned Arabic during my PhD and what is the best way for them to do the same. More often than not, I find myself simultaneously sympathizing with their plight and then dissuading them from trying to complete a PhD in IR and learn Arabic at the same time. The discomfort I experience when doing this comes from to the hypocrisy of my advice: it’s a classic case of ‘do as I say and not as I did’.
The reason I dissuade students from language learning and deep regional embeddedness is because I found to my dismay that learning Arabic and building a nuanced, deep knowledge of the Middle East
did nothing to improve my job chances in IR; and in some cases my regional knowledge has been regarded as a hindrance and not a benefit by potential employers.
On more than one occasion in job interviews, my skill set was challenged with the question of whether or not I considered myself a Lebanon specialist only.1 Furthermore even when jobs in IR were advertised as specifically seeking Middle East expertise, I found this to be a misnomer: universities wanted people who had researched case studies in the Middle East, not people who actually knew the region and spoke the language.
Regions have become critical levels of interaction to address local, regional and global socio-ecological changes in recent years. At the same time, regions are traditionally decision-making and negotiation mechanisms for economic and security cooperation in Central Asia, Africa, East Asia and Asia-Pacific. While regions are heavily featured in international relations (IR), there is no agreement on the definition, position, potential and practices of regions and regional institutionalization processes. Regardless of being the result of a natural process or a government-induced policy, geographical proximity has always played a pivotal role in defining regions (Mansfield and Milner, 1997). Another important element when discussing regions is their place within the international system. Regions can be local (micro), regional and global, but they can also be communities (non-states actors) and described as sub-regions (Uyar Makibayashi, 2015).
East Asia, one of the most dynamic areas of regional and global economic movements, a centre of demographic diversity and movement of people and host to powerful and complex environmental changes and natural disasters, is one region where some of the leading sub-regional, regional and international regional frameworks are located, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), ASEAN+3 (ASEAN and China, Japan and South Korea), regional trade agreements, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). While most of the regional arrangements are framed around political-economic, social and historical alignments, environmental issues have also started to gain attention at regional level (Shaw et al, 2011; De Lombaerde and Söderbaum, 2013; Uyar Makibayashi, 2015).
Functionalism is both a theory and an empirical observation that seeks to survey different nations through their common societal interests and problems without emphasizing power politics, nationalism or religious, cultural and ideological differences (Mitrany, 1966). It can be characterized as an issue-specific and technocratic approach to (regional) politics. It has been applied to the analysis of regional integration, international organizations and multilevel governance, and in interdependence literature (Wolf, 1973; Pagoulatos and Tsoukalis, 2012; Söderbaum, 2016). Despite its popularity in the 1950s, 1960s and 1990s, the theory does not figure prominently in recent contributions to the rapidly growing body of literature on regional cooperation or comparative regionalism. It is argued that the new literature on comparative regionalism should keep away from classical functionalism because it is an idealistic theory and it does not explain developments outside Europe (for example, Moravcsik, 1993; Hoffmann, 1995; Dannreuther, 2014). Against this established backdrop, the starting point of this chapter is to challenge this perception and demonstrate the usefulness of classical functionalism’s relevance to present-day regionalism.
Two studies have so far applied classical functionalist theory to the Caspian Sea region, namely Blum (2002) and Petersen (2016). However, they both fall into the common trap of judging the functional developments in the Caspian Sea region against an explicitly European benchmark, as do other scholars. Petersen (2016: 151) concludes that: ‘The integration currently underway in the energy and transport sectors has not placed pressure on other sectors to follow suit, the way that coal and steel integration in Western Europe did in the 1950s.’
Regional pan movements (Pan-Slavism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Africanism and so on), which proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were a hugely popular genre of political affiliation (O’Loughlin and van der Wusten, 1990). They appealed to supranational identities unified by ethnic, religious, geographical or other forms of likeness, especially in places where that unity was disrupted by political, geographical, territorial, national and international division and borders. Thereby, pan movements existed and indeed bloomed in the spaces between states, nations and empires. These movements were each distinct in their politics, in their formalized structures, appeal and reach. While at times pan movements were imperialistic, supported by various geopolitical theorists, they were also vehicles for emancipatory and anti-colonial politics, with pan-national movements in particular serving as important vehicles for transnational relations and creating a sense of regional identity and cohesion (Acharya, 2012; Sorrels, 2016). Despite the popular appeal of pan movements throughout the 20th century, most groups and their ideologies had almost or entirely dissipated by century’s end. This chapter sets out to investigate the lasting effects of two of the largest global pan movements, Pan-Asianism and Pan-Africanism and examine their lasting contributions to the debates surrounding the process of Globalizing IR. To situate them in the context of a global perspective on regionalism in international relations, the chapter raises three key questions: how did these two movements function to advance ideas about anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism? How did they take inspiration from each other, and function to both resist and accelerate region-specific nationalism and internationalism? And in the postcolonial world, how can their lasting effects on global order be traced and understood? By focusing the analysis of these two groups around these issues and investigating the agency they granted to various actors at specific moments, it is argued that pan movements have had a largely unrecognized impact on the shape and form of global order, with lasting impacts today.
Building on the recent initiative to truly globalize the field of international relations, this book provides an innovative interrogation of regionalism.
The book applies a globalizing framework to the study of regional worlds in order to move beyond the traditional conception of regionalism, which views regions as competing blocs dominated by great powers. Bringing together a wide range of case studies, the book shows that regions are instead dynamic configurations of social and political identities in which a variety of actors, including the less powerful, interact and partake in regionalization processes and have done so through the centuries.
There is today no region which impinges on India’s security with as much immediacy as West Asia. This is not surprising or new. For centuries our extended neighborhood in West Asia has been a part of our lives in India, beginning with the four thousand year old trading relationships evidenced by sailing ships on Indus Valley seals found in archeological sites in Iraq. These are truly historical, cultural, linguistic, religious and civilizational links. (Menon, 2013)
The visits by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to various Middle East states from 2015 to 2021 have highlighted an interest in a region that had been largely neglected in the foreign policy agenda of previous Indian governments. Some observers have interpreted these developments as indicators of a shifting Indian approach towards the Middle East (Gupta, 2017; Pethiyagoda, 2017; Brandenburg and Gopalaswamy, 2018; Pant, 2018). Others have argued that there is in fact more continuity than change in the determinants of India’s Middle East policy (Joshi, 2015; Gupta et al, 2019). Are these developing ties redefining the regional boundaries between two traditionally distinct South Asian and Middle Eastern regions? Or is it problematic to frame these growing transactions in logics of trans-regional cooperation, thereby (re-)producing arbitrary and Eurocentric spatial understandings of South Asia and the Middle East? Are present conceptualizations of the ‘region’ as an analytical category, mostly derived from the West European experience, useful to understand India’s evolving Middle East policy?
These questions are not trivial today given the contemporary debates over the role of regions in world politics and more specifically about India’s emergence from a regional to a global power.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in ‘the region’ as an analytical category for envisioning a more pluralistic world order. In his book, The End of American World Order, Amitav Acharya (2018) argued that students of world politics should put aside parochial perspectives of regionalism – understood as approaching regions solely from a Eurocentric vantage point. Similar to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000: 6) argument made in the case of global history, Acharya submits that the US has begun to decline from its uncontested hegemonic status in the existing global order and that it has reached a status similar to that of ‘European thought’: indispensable yet inadequate. Instead of designing a study of world order around United States (US) hegemony, Acharya advocates prioritizing our study around ‘regional worlds’ to better capture the renewed role of regionalism in world politics as viewed from multiple vantage points. Doing so challenges the structural view of regions imagined through regional hegemons as it has been primarily studied in international relations (IR), which in turn helps us not only to globalize but also to offer a more democratic imagining of IR. This approach also draws much needed attention to the ways in which different regional worlds relate to each other in modes that far exceed the dynamics and limited framework of great power rivalry. In contrast to mainstream approaches that view regions as competing blocs dominated by great powers, Acharya (2018: 100) sees regional worlds as ‘broader, inclusive, open, and interactive’. From this perspective, regions are dynamic configurations of social and political identities in which a variety of actors, including the less powerful, interact and partake in regional cooperation.
