Regional Security Complexes and Organizations

Scholarly attention to regional aspects of international security has increased markedly since the end of the Cold War. The focus on regions is evident in structural realist writing (Grieco, 1997), in rationalist accounts of international institutions (Wallander and Keohane, 1999), among scholars who explore the evolution of underlying conventions and practices (Hurrell, 2007) and among those who analyze how states construct their security interests (Acharya, 2001). The most promising research programme that deals with security matters at the regional level is the extensive body of scholarship that focuses on regional security complexes. This concept makes it possible to explicate the emergence and impact of a wide range of threats confronting policy-makers, most notably the tendency for conflicts that break out in one country to spread across the border into neighboring countries and the growing incidence of disputes over scarce water resources. The increasing interconnectedness of internal and external threats in the contemporary world gives adjacent states a strong incentive to co-ordinate their security policies, thereby creating renewed impetus to long-dormant regional organizations (Tavares, 2010).