Regionalism beyond state-centrism: African regionalism in comparative perspective

Abstract

Over the past few decades, regions and regional institutions have gained increased attention in both scholarly literature and policy debates. A fundamental weakness in both debates, however, is the simplified focus on state actors and the official goals and policies of regional international organizations and inter-state frameworks. This article addresses this extant weakness by opening up for a more diverse empirical reality. By drawing on the new regionalism approach and two illustrative, comparative case studies from West Africa and East Africa, we offer new insights about how state and non-state actors interact in both formal and informal domains in order to produce variegated logics of regionalism that are poorly described by other theoretical perspectives. The article concludes by assessing the implications for theory and future research on regionalism in Africa and in other regions.