Three trends have dominated the political economy of integration during the last two decades: globalization, economic nationalism, and regionalization. This book explores comparative regional integration, focusing on both intra­ regional integration and relations among regions in the context of power. The most common focus of integration studies has been on the logic of cooperation, but there is another logic of integration: power. The relevance of power today is represented by the relations within the Eurozone, especially between creditors and debtors. By the same line of reasoning, integration in Asia cannot ignore the respective roles of China, Japan, and Korea, nor the unresolved disputes about Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the islands in the South China Sea. This edited volume addresses the role of power in regional integration in three contexts: (1) the role of hegemonic external actors (the US and China) in regional integration; (2) the role of core states within regions (Germany, China , Japan, and Brazil); and (3) the role of noncore states- smaller and middle­ range powers (Italy and Greece in Europe; South Korea and Malaysia in Asia; and Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and Paraguay in Latin America). This book will benefit students and scholars of international relations and comparative political economy, especially those with an interest in integration studies and comparative regionalism.

This book examines the concept of regional power in international relations. Using the emerging powers of India and South Africa as the case studies, it explores how regional powers simultaneously differ and share common features. The book develops a method to classify and evaluate different types of regional powers and applies this typology to contemporary case studies of India and South Africa. Regional power is often expected to have a positive influence on region-specific problems of conflict, economic deprivation and political instability. In reality, an ‘achievement-expectations gap’ can be seen in many regional powers, which can be analysed and understood through observable variation in regional power. The author discovers that in addition to the management of the internal regional order, regional powers have to establish individuality whilst fitting into the global international environment, altering both regional dynamics and creating variance in the level of control within the region. Elucidating concepts and definitions, this book is an accessible and in-depth study that both introduces key concepts and provides a framework for the future study of regional power in international relations. Redefining Regional Power in International Relations will be of interest to students and scholars of regionalism and international relations.

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.

Regionalism has regained momentum in the post-Cold War era. New economic groupings continue to spring up across the globe, while older regional organizations have strengthened their institutional bases and broadened their scope. Explaining the reinvigoration of regionalism requires comparative analyses that not only highlight the commonalities that characterize various regional experiments but also account for the differential outcomes and divergent trajectories such projects exhibit. This collection of seminal articles on regionalism advances theoretical concepts that can stimulate useful comparisons, along with scholarly surveys of important instances of regionalism in the contemporary world. Besides classic studies of the European Union, the volume includes authoritative overviews and case studies of regionalist projects in East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Central Eurasia. An introductory essay situates these articles in the context of the five decade-long research program on regional integration theory.

This book comprises key essays on comparative regionalism and, more broadly, on regional conflict and cooperation by Professor Etel Solingen. The study of regionalism, a subject pioneered by Solingen in the 1990s, is now an established field of inquiry, with a large community of scholars and practitioners around the world. This book provides a window into an evolving conceptual framework for comparing regional arrangements, with a special emphasis on non-European regions. Framed by a comprehensive, previously unpublished introduction, the chapters provide a broad spectrum of analysis on domestic political economy, democracy, regional institutions, and global forces as they shape different regional outcomes and trajectories in economics and security. Themes as different as the regional effects of democratization in the Middle East and East Asia, the rise of China, Euro-Mediterranean relations, and regional nuclear trajectories are traced back to a common analytical core. The nature of domestic ruling coalitions serves as the pivotal analytical anchor explaining the effects of globalization and economic reform on different regional arrangements. This collection provides a focal point that brings this work together in a new light and will be of much interest to students of regionalism, international relations theory, international and comparative political economy, international history and grand strategy.

This book provides an alternative approach to regionalism in neglected parts of the world. Taking stock of several decades of conceptualization, the author provides a political sociology approach of regionalisms fed by recent contributions from the sociology of international relations and public policy analysis. It uses a methodological rather than theoretical framework to bring a new perspective on an emerging field of comparative regionalism. The relational dimensions, the social contexts and characteristics of actors and their practices are key to shed a new light on what is considered in this book as a ‘social international phenomenon’.

Undergraduate students in most preliminary courses in international politics are introduced to realist, liberal, and constructivist approaches, supplementing this theoretical introduction with conceptual discussions of the state, international system, and/or decision-making and policy formation. By the end of their college experience, undergraduate IR majors will engage coursework more narrowly focused on an empirical outcome, such as war, economic integration, development, or migration. These advanced courses are directly linked to modern research agendas and graduate level course material, usually with few references to the theoretical paradigms taught in introductory classes. This volume seeks to bridge the gap between what is taught in early undergraduate education and what is created by scholars, uniting abstract theoretical principles with practical contemporary policy and testable empirical questions.