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The Emerging Regional Architecture of World Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Amitav Acharya
Amitav Acharya
Affiliation:
University of Bristol, United Kingdom, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines the importance of regions in shaping world order. Reviewing two recent books that claim that the contemporary world order is an increasingly regionalized one, the author argues that regions matter to the extent they can be relatively autonomous entities. While both books accept that regions are social constructs, their answer to the question of who makes regions reflects a bias in favor of powerful actors. A regional understanding of world politics should pay more attention to and demonstrate how regions resist and socialize power—at both global and regional levels—rather than simply focusing on how powers construct regions. Power matters, but local responses to power, including strategies of exclusion, resistance, socialization, and binding, matter more in understanding how regions are socially constructed. The article elaborates on various types of responses to power from both state and societal actors in order to offer an inside-out, rather than outside-in, perspective on the regional architecture of world politics.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , July 2007 , pp. 629 - 652
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2007

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References

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2 Despite agreement on these basic points, the two books differ in significant ways. R&P covers all the major regions of the world, while AWR focuses on Europe and Asia, with a concluding chapter that discusses how its framework applies to other regions—South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. But AWR's thematic scope is wider, incorporating the economics-security nexus and the role of culture and identity in shaping regional interactions. R&P concentrates on security dynamics.

3 Katzenstein uses the terms “imperium” (that is, the combination of America's territorial and nonterritorial power) and “core states” (Japan and Germany), while Buzan and Wsever stick to more traditional categories such as superpower, great power, and regional power.

4 I disagree with the characterization of the South Pacific as an “unstructured region.” It has a fairly active regional institution, the South Pacific Forum, and the relatively small size of most of its member states creates a shared vulnerability and engenders a sense of security interdependence.

5 The notion of regional security complex has evolved since Buzan first proposed it in 1983. Then, RSCs designated only areas of intense rivalry (for example, India-Pakistan; Arab states-Israel, North and South Korea), while ignoring regions where the main pattern of relationship is cooperative; Buzan, Barry, “A Framework for Regional Security Analysis,” in Buzan, Barry and Rizvi, Gowher, eds., South Asian Insecurity and the Great Powers (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 8Google Scholar. In the new formulation they may vary from anarchy (“conflict formations”) to “security communities,” where war has been rendered unthinkable.

6 There are other types of complexes. Supercomplexes are a number of RSCs bound together by one or more great powers that generate “relatively high and consistent levels of interregional security dynamics.” Subcomplexes are similar to an RSC but are firmly embedded within a larger RSC. Precomplexes are potential RSCs or RSCs in the making, but the bilateral relationships have not yet reached the level of interdependence to qualify as a full-fledged RSC. Protocomplexes occur when the degree of security interdependence within a region is sufficient to differentiate it from its neighbours, but the overall regional security dynamics remains thinner and weaker than a fully fledged RSC (Buzan and Wasver, 490–92). Finally, a “mini-complex” is an RSC on a small scale, composed at least partly of substate actors.

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16 Security complexes may merge to become “supercomplexes” or may split. They may become conflict prone or peaceful through “securitization and desecuritization.” Securitization involves taking extraordinary measures to address challenges that have been labeled/constructed as existential threats to a state or other international actors (including regions) (Buzan and Wasver, 71). Desecuritization refers to the reverse process whereby issues already labeled as such are taken out of the emergency mode and put back into normal political sphere (Buzan and Waever, 71).

17 R&P discusses material security linkages between the neighboring RSCs, such as South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia; the Middle East and Africa; North and South America; and the links between Russia and Europe and Asia (Buzan and Waever, chap. 6 and pp. 258–60, 333–37, 429–33).

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26 Lake and Morgan (fn. 1), 12.

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60 Neumann (fn. 9), 57.

61 Murphy (fn. 9), 30.

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