Crafting Cooperation

Regional institutions are an increasingly prominent feature of world politics. Their characteristics and performance vary widely: some are highly legalistic and bureaucratic, while others are informal and flexible. They also differ in terms of inclusiveness, decision-making rules and commitment to the non-interference principle. This is the first book to offer a conceptual framework for comparing the design and effectiveness of regional international institutions, including the EU, NATO, ASEAN, OAS, AU and the Arab League. The case studies, by a group of leading scholars of regional institutions, offer a rigorous, historically informed analysis of the differences and similarities in institutions across Europe, Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa. The chapters provide a more theoretically and empirically diverse analysis of the design and efficacy of regional institutions than heretofore available.

Regional institutions are an increasingly prominent feature of world politics. Their characteristics and performance vary widely: some are highly legalistic and bureaucratic, while others are informal and flexible. They also differ in terms of inclusiveness, decision-making rules and commitment to the non-interference principle. This is the first book to offer a conceptual framework for comparing the design and effectiveness of regional international institutions, including the EU, NATO, ASEAN, OAS, AU and the Arab League. The case studies, by a group of leading scholars of regional institutions, offer a rigorous, historically informed analysis of the differences and similarities in institutions across Europe, Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa. The chapters provide a more theoretically and empirically diverse analysis of the design and efficacy of regional institutions than heretofore available.

This work is a collection of twenty-five articles previously published in Global Governance - one from each year of the journal’s existence – highlighting some of the best work published in the journal, along with an Introduction by the two editors Kurt Mills and Kendall Stiles.

War, famine, poverty, organized crime, environmental catastrophes, refugees, epidemics and pandemics, modern slavery – all these affect people in the non-Western world to an increasingly disproportionate extent. It is also where wealthy governments wield economic leverage and military force to renegotiate existing norms of international relations. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to overestimate the importance and urgency of comprehending the mechanisms and motivations driving these phenomena. This book is the outcome of a decade-long effort to advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of what motivates non-Western governments’ decisions to cooperate/not cooperate regionally. It starts by acknowledging the Western-centrism of prevailing international relations theories, abandoning deeply entrenched assumptions regarding the nature and roles of states, and redefining state weakness. The inquiry continues by elaborating this new concept and applying it to Southeast Asian polities while positing that it creates governments vulnerable to internal and external threats, in line with Joel S. Migdal’s well-known findings on the topic. A set of regional cooperation strategies is then inferred, based on the survival needs of insecure governing elites and its empirical validity is tested against the experience of regional organizations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The second part of the book provides an in-depth examination of how Southeast Asian governments’ shared security needs and interests shaped the emergence of the identified regional cooperation pattern and its evolution over 50 years of cooperation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Overall, this book is a call to international relations scholars to do our part in understanding non-Western experiences and making a substantive contribution to addressing humanity’s most intractable security threats.

Over the past few decades states all around the globe have intensified institutionalized cooperation at the regional level. To deepen our understanding of state-led regionalism, the authors use an analytical framework comprising four main strands. First, they describe and explain the genesis and growth of regional organizations. Second, they account for institutional design, looking at important similarities and differences. Third, they examine the interaction between organizations and member states in an attempt to reveal factors that shape the level of commitment to and compliance with regional initiatives. Finally, they consider the impact of regional organizations on their member states. They conclude by providing a foundation for future research on the dynamic development of regionalism.

New developments in the Asia Pacific are forcing regional officials to rethink the way they manage security issues. The contributors to this work explore why some forms of security cooperation and institutionalisation in the region have proven more feasible than others. This work describes the emergence of the professions in late tsarist Russia and their struggle for autonomy from the aristocratic state. It also examines the ways in which the Russian professions both resembled and differed from their Western counterparts.

This unique collection of original essays describes preferential trade agreements, explains why they have spread and explores their effects.

Defining and conceptualizing Northeast Asia’s security complex poses unique quandaries. The security architecture in Northeast Asia to date has been predominately U.S.-dominated bilateral alliances, weak institutional structures and the current Six Party Talks dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue. There has been a distinct lack of desire among regional countries as well as the U.S. to follow in the footsteps of Europe with its robust set of multilateral institutions. However, since the late 1990s, there has been burgeoning interest among regional states towards forming new multilateral institutions as well as reforming and revitalizing existing mechanisms. Much of this effort has been in the economic and political arenas, with the creation of bodies such as the East Asian Summit, but there have also been important initiatives in the security sphere. This book offers detailed examinations about how this potentially tense region of the world is redefining certain longstanding national interests, and shows how this shift is the result of changing power relations, the desire to protect hard-won economic gains, as well as growing trust in new processes designed to foster regional cooperation over regional conflict. Presenting new and timely research on topics that are vital to the security future of one of the world’s most important geographical regions, this book will be of great value to students and scholars of Asian politics, regionalism, international politics and security studies.