Regional Economic Communities and Integration in Southern Africa

Regional Economic Communities and Integration in Southern Africa
Author: Leon Mwamba Tshimpaka
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811593884

This book examines regional integration in Africa, with a particular focus on the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It argues that the SADC’s pursuit of a rationalist and state-centric form of integration for Southern Africa is limited, as it overlooks the contributory role and efficacy of non-state actors, who are relegated to the periphery. The book demonstrates that civil society networks in Southern Africa constitute well-governed, self-organised entities that function just like formal regional arrangements driven by state actors and technocrats. The book amplifies this point by deploying New Institutionalism and the New Regionalism Approach to examine the role and efficacy of non-state actors in building regions from below. The book develops a unique typology that shows how Southern African regional civil society networks adopt strategies, norms and rules to establish an efficient form of alternative integration in the region. Based on a critical analysis of this self-organised regionalism, the book projects the reality that alternative regionalism driven by non-state actors is possible. This book expands the study of regionalism in the SADC, and makes a significant and innovative contribution to the study of contemporary regionalism.

Regionalism without Regions

Regionalism without Regions
Author: Ulrich Schmid
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-08-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789637326639

This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation. The overarching objective of the book is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in the analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The authors—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the USA—explicitly go beyond the perspective of an entity defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The research project that led to the composition of the book combined quantitative (statistical surveys conducted across Ukraine) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus-group discussion) methods. The authors came to the conclusion that regionalism as a defining phenomenon of Ukraine is more prominent than the regions themselves. This approach regards Ukraine as a construct in flux where different discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge through the lenses of various disciplines and methodologies.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism
Author: Tanja A. Börzel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 705
Release: 2016
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199682305

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism - the first of its kind - offers a systematic and wide-ranging survey of the scholarship on regionalism, regionalization, and regional governance. Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field synthesize the state of the art, provide a guide to the comparative study of regionalism, and identify future avenues of research. Twenty-seven chapters review the theoretical and empirical scholarship with regard to the emergence of regionalism, the institutional design of regional organizations and issue-specific governance, as well as the effects of regionalism and its relationship with processes of regionalization. The authors explore theories of cooperation, integration, and diffusion explaining the rise and the different forms of regionalism. The handbook also discusses the state of the art on the world regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Various chapters survey the literature on regional governance in major issue areas such as security and peace, trade and finance, environment, migration, social and gender policies, as well as democracy and human rights. Finally, the handbook engages in cross-regional comparisons with regard to institutional design, dispute settlement, identities and communities, legitimacy and democracy, as well as inter- and transregionalism.

Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management

Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management
Author: Anna Ohanyan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0804794944

Most regions of the world are plagued by conflicts that are made insoluble by a confluence of complex threads from history, geography, politics, and culture. These "frozen conflicts" defy conflict management interventions by both internal and external agents and institutions. Worse, they constantly threaten to extend beyond their local geographies, as in the terrorist bombings in Boston by ethnic Chechens, or to escalate from skirmishes to full-scale war, as in Nagorno-Karabakh. Consequently, such conflicts cry out for alternative approaches to the classic, state-focused, and sovereignty-based conflict management models that are practiced in traditional diplomacy—which most often produce rather short-term, ad hoc, fragmented interventions and outcomes. Drawing upon the cases of the South Caucasus, the Western Balkans, Central America, South East Asia, and Northern Ireland, Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management offers a theoretical and practical solution to this impasse by arguing for regional collective interventions that involve a long-term reengineering of existing conflict management infrastructure on the ground. Such approaches have been attracting the attention of scholars and practitioners alike yet, thus far, these concepts have rarely involved more than simple prescriptions for regional cooperation between grassroots actors and traditional diplomacy. Specifically, says Anna Ohanyan, only the cultivation and establishment of regional peace systems can provide an effective path toward conflict management in these standoffs in such intractably divided regions.

Global Politics of Regionalism

Global Politics of Regionalism
Author: Mary Farrell
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2005-08-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Textbook on regionalism and its role in a global marketplace, ideal for students of IR and globalisation.

Rethinking Civil Society Regionalism in Africa

Rethinking Civil Society Regionalism in Africa
Author: Dele Kogbe
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2022-10-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 100073577X

This book interrogates the extent to which regional civil society organisations have evolved as actors in West Africa. Examining civil society democratic participation in regional integration and involvement in regionalism of peacebuilding, it rethinks how we study civil society in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region. Beyond the functional typology of civil society actors as ‘partner’, ‘legitimiser’, ‘resistance/counter-hegemonic’ and ‘manipulator’, the book develops a new analytical framework to understand how organisations such as the West African Civil Society Forum (WACSOF) and West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) have evolved. Offering analytical perspectives of the actorship of specific regional civil society actors, the book draws attention to the tendencies in the previous studies of mistaking an action or misdeed that is empirically specific to particular civil society organisations within a region to the generality of the civic space of the region. Providing an alternative perspective aimed at invoking a new intellectual conversation about civil society regionalism this book advances a new analytical framework of action-based regional identity of civil society, regional presence of activities, regional capacities and societal impact. It will be of interest to academics and scholars of international relations, global governance, African politics and comparative regionalism.

Crisis and Institutional Change in Regional Integration

Crisis and Institutional Change in Regional Integration
Author: Sabine Saurugger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317359658

Comparative regional integration has met with increasing interest over the last twenty years with the emergence or reinforcing of new regional dynamics in the EU, NAFTA, MERCOSUR and ASEAN. This volume systematically and comparatively analyses the reasons for regional integration and stalemate in European, Latin American and Asian regional integration. It examines whether regional integration systems change in crisis periods, or more precisely in periods of economic crises, and why they change in different directions. Based on a neo-institutionalist research framework and rigorously comparative research design, the individual chapters analyse why financial and economic crises lead to more or less integrated systems and which factors lead to these institutional changes. Specifically it addresses institutional change in regional integration schemes, power relations between member states and the institutions in different policy domains, and change in individual or collective citizens’ attitudes towards regional integration. Adopting an actor-centred approach, the book highlights which regional integration schemes are influenced by economic and financial crises and how to explain this. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and policy specialists in regional integration, European Politics, International Relations, and Latin American and Asian studies.

The New Regionalism in Africa

The New Regionalism in Africa
Author: Fredrik Söderbaum
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351885014

This edited volume transcends conventional state-centric and formalistic notions of regionalism and theorizes, conceptualizes and analyzes the complexities and contradictions of regionalization processes in contemporary Africa. The collection not only unpacks and theorizes the African state-society complex with regard to new regionalism, but also explicitly integrates the often neglected discourse of human security and human development. In so doing, the book moves the discussion of new regionalism forward at the same time as it adds important insights to security and development. It is organized into three parts. Part I theorizes, conceptualizes and analyzes the new regionalism in Africa from the point of view of the region (e.g. West, East, Central and Southern Africa). The national perspectives in Part II focus on the new regionalism in Africa from the point of view of particular countries or specific state-society complexes, such as Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the enclave of Cabinda, Angola and Zambia. Part III contains two concluding chapters that tie the main threads of the volume together, theoretically and empirically, and discuss the contribution of the analytical framework, the new regionalism approach (NRA) to the larger study of regionalism.

Ideological Foundations and Development Expectations of Caribbean Regionalism

Ideological Foundations and Development Expectations of Caribbean Regionalism
Author: Myrtle Chuck-A-Sang
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2023-03-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 169871419X

Foci of publications This publication is intended to be an invaluable tool to the avid researcher on Caribbean regionalism and related subjects. The range of papers presented, probe areas such as the institutional development of one of the most enduring economic integration systems in the international community, the workings of its major institutions and indeed its very survival. The importance of record keeping to the survival of any institution or major grouping is the message that permeates this volume given its role in enabling an understanding of our past and in the holistic development and preservation of the region’s cultural identity.

Revisiting Regionalism and the Contemporary World Order

Revisiting Regionalism and the Contemporary World Order
Author: Élise Féron
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2019-10-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3847414976

The book critically analyzes the ongoing changes in the regional, intra-regional, and global dynamics of cooperation, from a multi-disciplinary and pluralist perspective. It is based on the insight that in a post-hegemonic world the formation of regions and the process of globalization can be largely disconnected from the orbit of the US, and that a plurality of power and worldviews has replaced US hegemony. In spite of these changes, most existing analyses of current changes in the world order still rely upon Western-centered approaches, and Westphalian thinking. Against this backdrop, the book proposes to advance a truly global IR understanding of the post-hegemonic world, and weaves together the pluralist and multi-disciplinary perspectives of scholars located all around the world.