Regional Organisations and Security

Conceptions and practices

Stephen Aris,Andreas Wenger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134118656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Sécurité nationale

This book aims to examine the conceptions and practices of security adopted by Regional Organisations (ROs) across the globe.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an increased focus on regions as a relevant realm for security, with actors within regional contexts identifying a significant degree of interdependency between one another. As a consequence, international security has taken on a distinct regionally institutionalised character, as seen by the increase in calls for greater utilisation of 'Chapter VIII: Regional Arrangements' of the UN, in order to create a devolved UN-led system of global security management. However, the idea of a system of global security management is a remote prospect, because divergence seems to be as important as commonality in terms of regional security.

In light of the above, Regional Organisations and Security analyses the primary ROs that are active in Africa, Asia, Eurasia, the Middle East and South America. The findings of individual case studies are compiled to highlight disparities and similarities in how security is seen, prioritised, understood, practised, managed and implemented across regions. On this basis, the authors reach conclusions about whether we live in an increasingly globalised or regionally distinct world, and go on to assess the prospects for a globalised system of security management and consider how this might be developed and organised.

This book will be of interest to students of comparative regionalism, international organisations, international security and IR.

1 Introduction

Stephen Aris

Since the end of the Cold War, the international system has been interpreted as highly regionalised in terms of security, with actors within regional contexts identifying a significant degree of interdependency between one another in terms of security. The study of regions, regionalism and regional security has thus become increasingly prominent over the last few decades.¹ This has been accompanied by a focus on the regional by policy-makers in both national and international politics. This twin academic and policy emphasis has led the current international system to be characterised as a ‘World of Regions’.² Indeed, some scholars have suggested that ‘the 21st century could become the century of regionalism’.³

During the same period, common understandings of what constitutes security are considered to have moved beyond a traditional ‘military, state-centric agenda’, ‘deepening the referent object beyond the state, widening the concept of security to include other sectors than the military, giving equal emphasis to domestic and trans-border threats’.⁴ New agendas have emerged that identify a wide range of threats, many of which are transnational in nature.⁵ This has served to further the view that a single actor cannot ensure its security independently of the security of other related actors, or so called spillover effects. Such interdependency is often said to be based upon sharing a particular regional context.⁶

As a result of the greater prioritisation of the region as a political space and new security agendas, political elites and leaderships have sought to develop regionally coordinated solutions to security. This has led to the formation of new regional organisations (RO) and the reinvigoration, refocusing or expansion of existing regional multilateral institutions. As a consequence, international security has taken on a distinct regionally institutionalised character.⁷ An important aspect in the study of contemporary international security is therefore to understand the security conceptions and practices of the various ROs active within the international system, and how they interact with those seen as representing global governance.

Parallel to the growing interest in the connection between regional organisation and security, there has been an increased focus on the globalisation of security, and thus the need for mechanisms of global security management. This view has also been driven by the greater awareness of the interconnected nature of security dynamics, whereby events in one state or part of the world may also have repercussions that cause insecurity in another state or part of the world. Threats such as climate change and health epidemics are said to function on a global level and require global coordination in order to counteract them effectively. A central component of this increased emphasis on global security management has been the role of international institutions, such as the UN, in setting global norms and standards for security. Such organisations, as well as coalitions of the willing, have taken interventionary action to bring security crises under control in all parts of the world, with the US and NATO being labelled the ‘policemen of the world’.⁸

In light of these multiple transformations in international politics, an important issue for security at all levels – local, state, regional and global – is how the ‘World of Regions’ and the globalised security agenda interact. As outlined by Crocker et al. (2011), ‘[t]he relative salience of global versus regional initiative, capability and legitimacy is central to understanding basic trends and tension in international security’.⁹ However, as Cooper et al. (2007) note, the ‘relationship between global governance and regionalization is fraught with ambiguity’.¹⁰ This is in part a reflection of the decision ‘to opt for a universal and global focus’ rather than a regional one the victorious powers of the Second World War set up an institutionalised system of global security based on the UN, according to which Chapter VIII Regional Arrangements of the UN Charter ‘merely left a minor opening’ for ROs to interact with the UN.¹¹

Although, as outlined above, ROs have become both more numerous and increasingly significant players in regional, and in some cases, global security, they have ‘developed completely detached from the rather “dormant” chapter VIII – with different mandates, geographical areas to cover, structures, and resources’.¹² Responding to this trend, over the past decade, the UN has sought to expand its engagement with ROs, and clarify the nature of its relationship with ROs as part of its ‘primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security’.¹³ In a 2006 report entitled ‘Regional-Global Security Partnership’, the UN Secretary General declared

that the international community stands to benefit in the maintenance of peace and security from a balance between the intimate knowledge of a conflict situation possessed by a regional organization and the global legitimacy and authority of the Security Council.¹⁴

This increased effort to iron out and enhance its relationships with ROs is due to growing recognition by the UN of both the relevance of ROs in addressing many contemporary security challenges, but also the limits to its own capacity in dealing with these. Since its formation, and especially since the end of the Cold War, there has been an increase in demands from actors across the international system for the UN to fulfil its mandate of maintaining international peace and security, alongside a widening in the scope of the UN’s activities.¹⁵ In particular, its ‘peacekeeping system faces a paradigmatic crisis of the operational, managerial and political mechanisms’.¹⁶ As a result, the UN increasingly pursues ‘“subcontracting” and “partnering” modes of global-regional cooperation in peacekeeping’,¹⁷ to share the burden by utilising ROs capacities to enact operations.¹⁸

Indeed, there is an ongoing policy and academic discussion about the role that ROs can play in a system of coordinated international security management.¹⁹ The most optimistic perspective on this relationship is a system in which the responsibility for the implementation of internationally agreed and legitimised security functions would be given to ROs accredited by the UN for such purposes. However, this optimism appears misplaced at the present time, as currently ‘[t]he only regional political body that meets regularly with the members of the [UN Security] Council is the AU Peace and Security Council’.²⁰ Thus, the UN relationship with ROs is both largely superficial in nature and limited to only a few of the many ROs across the international system. This is conditioned, in large part, by a mismatch between the ‘World of Regions’ and global security management:²¹ there is disagreement between regional perspectives on conceptions and practices of security at a global level,²² with diverging regional interpretations of commonly defined principles and resolutions,²³ as well as a lack of regional enactment of certain global agreements.

Many would argue that this state of affairs is largely due to the framing of the global according to a Western regional perspective.²⁴ Highlighting the importance of the political context in the formation of what we think of as the prevailing global order, Postel-Vinay points out that ‘global orders have not been engendered globally but by a localisable, region-based, production centre, they are necessarily exogenous to those who did not participate in their genesis’.²⁵ Indeed, the fact that the global perspective is not shared by all other regional actors is asserted by those who feel that their agency has been mitigated within this global order. A recent example was the African Union’s lack of support for the UN-endorsed NATO-led operation in Libya and criticism thereafter by some African states, as well as Russia and China (who after negotiation with the other permanent members of the UNSC agreed to abstain rather than veto Resolution 1973), of what they saw as the subsequent reinterpretation of the meaning and scope of this resolution by the US, France and UK from the establishment of a no-fly zone to actively supporting and arming the opposition groups against the Gadhafi regime.

Following this, South African President Jacob Zuma used the opportunity of the rotating Presidency of the UNSC to push through Resolution 2033 enhancing the relationship between the UN and the AU. On its unanimous adoption on 12 January 2012, he noted that the African Union’s political road map for resolving the Libyan conflict ‘had been ignored in favour of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) bombing, with consequences that had spilled over into other countries’, adding that ‘Africa must never be a playground for furthering the interest of other regions ever again’.²⁶ Hence, there is a degree of contestation between the global security agenda and the ‘World of Regions’, whereby the actors in some regions do not necessarily conceive of, or practice, security in the same way as either the global or other regions. Furthermore, ‘no two regions have the same security culture or regional security architecture, and there are important differences in the way threats to security are weighed’.²⁷ This includes contrasting positions between ROs on both regional and global issues, for example between the African Union and the Arab League on Resolution 1973 on Libya, and between the African Union and ECOWAS over the resolution on intervention in Ivory Coast in 2011.

Research themes and aim of the book

This book considers the conceptions and practices of security of the main ROs active in Africa, Asia, Eurasia, the Middle East and South America. It is based on chapters by authors with extensive regional knowledge, who examine a specific RO’s constructions and perceptions of security; and how this understanding of security is enacted, in terms of the practices developed and policies implemented by the RO. To ensure a degree of analytical, if not conceptual, consistency, the authors of the ten empirical case studies of ROs were asked to consider four main research themes:

• Impact of regional context on the shape of security multilateralism

• Impact of the nature of institutional arrangements on security multilateralism

• Content and nature of the conception of security

• Content and nature of the security practices

The findings of these case studies are then compiled to highlight disparities and similarities in how security is seen, prioritised, understood, practised, managed and implemented across these ROs. On this basis, insights are drawn about whether we live in an increasingly globalised or regionally distinct world in terms of security conceptions and practices, and the prospects for a globalised system of security management based on RO are considered. The final two chapters, based on the preceding empirical case studies, thus address the following research themes:

• How much consensus or divergence is there among regional security actors within the international system?

• Do we live in an increasingly globalised world in terms of security perceptions and responses, or are regional differences paramount?

• Is security seen as a regionalised domain?

• Does the state remain at the heart of security in the international system?

• Is there a relationship between conceptions of security and practice, or can common practices be developed without similar interpretations of security?

Position in the literature

This book can be located within the field of regionalism and seeks to make a contribution to this literature by its focus on assessing the security conceptions and practices of ROs. As already noted, the study of regionalism and regional security has grown significantly since the end of the Cold War.²⁸ A number of works have surveyed regional contexts with the aim of conceptualising security within these contexts,²⁹ investigating the role of key states, or regional powers, in shaping these regional contexts.³⁰ Other research utilises a conceptual framework on security (security governance) to assess regional settings.³¹ Beyond the sub-fields of regionalism and regional security, the field of international institutions has considered the role of regional organisations.³² However, such perspectives have focused on the development and design of regional organisations as institutions, rather than as security actors.

While a lot of literature exists on the Western experience of regional multilateralism, primarily the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), there is relatively little analysis of ROs beyond the West and how these actors conceptualise and practice security. There have, however, been a few works that attempt to bring the study of regional security and the international institutions l...