Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)
Cambridge University Press, 12/4/2003
EAN 9780521891110, ISBN10: 0521891116
Paperback, 594 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm
Language: English
This book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.
Part I. Introduction
Developing a Regional Approach to Global Security
1. Theories and histories about the structure of contemporary international security
2. Levels
distinguishing the regional from the global
3. Security complexes
a theory of regional security
Part II. Asia
4. South Asia
inching towards internal and external transformation
5. Northeast and southeast Asian security complexes during the Cold War
6. The 1990s and beyond
an emergent east Asian complex
Conclusion
Part III. The Middle East and Africa
Introduction
7. The Middle East
a perennial conflict formation
8. Sub-saharan Africa
security dynamics in a setting of weak and failed states
Conclusions
Part IV. The Americas
9. North America
the sole superpower and its surroundings
10. South America
an under-conflictual anomaly?
Conclusion
scenarios for the RSCs of the Americas
Part V. The Europes
Introduction
11. EU-Europe
the European Union and its 'near abroad'
12. The Balkans and Turkey
13. The post-Soviet space
a regional security complex around Russia
Conclusion
scenarios for the European supercomplex
Part VI. Conclusions
14. Regions and powers
summing up and looking ahead
15. Reflections on conceptualising international security.
'The empirical sweep of the study is monumental. This book is a major re-think of the problem of security in the post-Cold War world and successfully challenges conventional and competing approaches.' Kalevi J. Holsti, University of British Columbia