Researching regional security governance: dimensions, debates and discourses: Shaun Breslin and Stuart Croft

Abstract

This volume seeks to set out how we might understand the role of regions in the provision of security and, indeed, of insecurity practices across the globe. Of course, there has long been an interest in this form of thinking in security studies. For over fifty years now, various authors have sought to develop notions of ‘security community’, and have sought to set out where and how such communities might develop. This has been matched by a focus in particular schools of thought on the role of regions and security, thinking here in particular of regional security complex theory, associated with the Copenhagen School. In one of the key contemporary texts on security communities, Adler and Barnett (1998) set out an evolution of such a community through three stages – nascent, ascendant and mature. While nascent security communities meet expectations of peaceful change, a region’s evolution might go as far as a mature security community, one that would be characterized by some collective security mechanisms and supranational or transnational elements. Such a mature security community – which evokes most closely what Karl Deutsch originally wrote about – could also be seen as either ‘tight’ or ‘loosely coupled’, depending, of course, on the relevant level of their integration. Such a framework has allowed for much debate by authors such as Acharya, Khoo and Ba about the relevant status of institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (see, for example, Ba, 2005). In Regions and Security, Buzan and Waever take the Copenhagen School’s focus on regional security complex theory (RSCT) and apply the concept globally. Their starting point is that ‘the regional level of security has become both more autonomous and more prominent in international politics’ (Buzan and Waever, 2003: 3). There is also an acceleration of the process from the period of decolonization through to the end of the Cold War. ‘Security complexes may well be extensively penetrated by the global powers, but their regional dynamics nonetheless have a substantial degree of autonomy from the patterns set by the global powers’ (Buzan and Waever, 2003: 4). RSCT enables the authors to divide the world into regional security complexes, and to understand the role of the regional and the global, and the interaction between them.