Leading South Asia expert Bhumitra Chakma explains the politics of regionalism in South Asia and traces the origins and evolution of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) from its inception to the present day.
He takes an International Relations perspective and engages three major IR theoretical approaches – neorealism, institutionalism and constructivism – to explain the complex dynamics of South Asian regionalism.
Using comparative perspectives based on the experiences of similar regional organizations, the author provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges of cooperation in the region and explores how progress might be made in the future.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution and particularities of regional organizations across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe since 1945.
The authors analyze the membership dynamics and policy scopes of 76 organizations, and compare their opportunities and challenges in regional governance. They consider organizations’ competencies in eleven different policy areas, including trade, security and environment, and trace patterns in their development.
For those with interests in comparative regionalism, international relations, political science and international law, this is an essential companion to some of the world’s most significant organizations.
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.
Coups d’état continue to present one of the most extreme risks to democracy and stable governance worldwide. This book examines the unique role played by regional organisations (ROs) following the occurrence of a coup d’état.
The book analyses which factors influence the strength of reactions demonstrated by ROs and explores which different post-coup solutions ROs pursue. It argues that, when confronted with a coup, ROs take both basic democratic standards and regional stability into account before forming their responses.
Using a mixed methods approach, the book concludes that ROs respond more decisively to a coup based on how detrimental it will be for the state of democracy in a country, and the higher its risk of destabilizing the region.
207 FIFTEEN Conclusion: prospects for regionalism John Adams, Simon Lee and John Tomaney The rise of regionalism? The aim of this book has been to cast a spotlight over the current state of regionalism in England. This inevitably presents only a snapshot of an evolving situation. The varied contributions in the book, however, make clear that the pattern of regionalism is highly uneven. At the same time, there are forces at play that are likely to ensure that regionalism remains a part of the political scene in England. In fact, by mid-2002, there was evidence
While only a few ROs existed shortly after the end of WWII, they have mushroomed in all regions over the past 70 years and sparked a revival of the comparative regionalism research agenda. A few ROs in Asia are the focus of research, such as ASEAN and the SCO (Ambrosio, 2008 ; Nesadurai, 2008 ; Nguitragool and Rüland, 2015 ; Dosch, 2017 ; Spandler, 2019 ; Scott-Smith, 2020 ), but most organizations do not attract much scholarly consideration. This is unfortunate as there are a dozen more ROs in the Asian region that deserve attention, especially from a
ROs have proliferated around the globe, becoming larger in size and broader in policy scope over time (see Chapter 3 ). This chapter examines whether there are regional particularities in the development of African ROs. To this end, it sheds light on patterns and trajectories of regional cooperation in Africa by putting all 23 African ROs in comparative perspective. Thus, this chapter complements the various case studies on selected individual ROs (Mazzeo, 1984 ; Söderbaum, 1996 , 2003 ; Bach, 2016 ; Hartmann, 2016 ). In a first step, the chapter
129 8 Regional Influence and Ambitions Introduction The Middle East has provided the world with no shortage of crises in the last century and this one so far. Both the current political stand- off between the US and Iran and the civil wars in yemen and Syria demonstrate the degree to which these events have a long history. From the late 18th century until the First World War and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in its aftermath, the region has been a battleground for competing Western powers. Since the discovery of oil in Iran, one of the key
77 4 Building Regional Communities: The Role of Regional Organizations in Africa Densua Mumford 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
Introduction Beyond SAARC, sub-regional and trans-regional initiatives 1 to foster economic cooperation represent two other dimensions of regionalism in South Asia. The politics behind the rise of sub-regionalism and trans-regionalism is significant because of their implications for SAARC. Arguably, they may be viewed either as complementary or dilutional to SAARC-led regionalism. Initiatives such as the South Asian Growth Quadrangle (SAGQ) or the BBIN (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal) initiative grew within the context of SAARC. Theoretically, there
