Regional Security Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Regional security pertains to the theoretical and empirical conceptualization of security from a macro regional perspective. It stems from the idea that regional security has a degree of autonomy from global collective security and from national security strategies. In a globalized world, which accentuates the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and is, moreover, conducive to the permeation of national borders, it is virtually impossible to conceive security uniquely from a national perspective. Thus, by transcending bilateral relations, polities cluster regionally to protect themselves against their common regional threats. Similarly, regional security also is autonomous vis-à-vis global security in the sense that macro regions follow certain patterns that cannot be replicated universally.

Regional security can be illustrated by the geographical diffusion of conflicts and by the formation of zones of peace. In the post–cold war era, the majority of conflicts have a regional component. Several regions of the world are struggling with cross-border ethnic tension, illegal immigration, transnational crime, failed states, civil wars, or deficient management of common water resources. These social (ethnic), political, economic, and military linkages at the regional level that derive from intra and interstate disputes, therefore, have created specific clusters that are recognized as regional conflict complexes, regional conflict formations, or regional peace and security clusters.

The opposite also holds. Some regions seem to maintain a long-standing capacity to remove military interstate disputes from the regional political game. The term zone of peace has been commonly associated with the long periods of peaceful interchange between democratic countries, which may be portrayed by the attainment of a security community in South America (since 1883), North America (since 1917), or Australasia and western Europe (since 1945).

In the conceptualization of regional security, another key aspect is agency. In this equation one needs to consider the role played by regional and subregional organizations in the maintenance of regional peace and security. According to Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter, regional arrangements and agencies have been empowered to handle intraregional conflicts as they offer comparative advantages. First, as the members of an organization share the same cultural background, they are likely to be more in tune with a conflict at hand. Second, personal relationships with the leaders have developed in the past, which results in greater understanding of the situation and may result in fruitful dialogue based on personal trust. Third, as time is of the essence in a crisis situation, regional organizations could offer a more timely response, compared to bureaucratic global organizations as the United Nations or foreign states. Fourth, as the members of a regional organization are the ones who would suffer more directly the impacts of the conflict, they have a legitimate vital interest at stake in preserving regional stability.

Regional Security Theory

The phenomenon of regional security has been described and explained by a gamut of different approaches, of which the most prominent are the regional security complex theory (RSCT), the regional orders approach, and the zones of peace approach.

First developed by Barry Buzan, the regional security complex theory is marked by the idea that security is a relational matter based on the (positive or negative) interdependence of units at the regional level. This is the principle that leads to the formation of macroregions of security and paves the way for regions to be objects of analysis in themselves—particular locations where one can find outcomes and sources of explanations. Regional security complexes are defined as “a set of units whose major processes of securitization, desecuritization, or both are so interlinked that their security problems cannot reasonably be analyzed or resolved apart from one another” (Buzan and Wæver, 2003).The structure of regional complexes is composed of (1) the arrangement of units and the differentiation among them, (2) the patterns of amity and enmity, and (3) the distribution of power among the principal units. RSCT also introduced a social constructivist approach to understand the process by which issues become securitized. The process of securitization is interpreted as a speech act, by which security issues range from nonpoliticized through politicized to securitized. Security is thereby approached as a self-referential practice, in the sense that an issue becomes a security issue as the result of a practice (i.e., the securitization of a threat is the consequence of a perception by a securitization actor and not necessarily the consequence of a real and objective threat).

The second prominent theory of regional security is the regional orders approach. David Lake and Patrick Morgan (1997) introduce the idea of regional order as an important paradigm to understand regional security. The authors define a regional security complex as “a set of states continually affected by one or more security externalities that emanate from a distinct geographic area.” By introducing the idea of externality, they imply that a regional security complex is not contingent to territorial contiguity given that in some cases an externality of a complex has an impact on another country (or vice versa) with which the complex shares no borders. The authors contend, hence, that “geography defines the physical area from which security externalities radiate, not the set of states that may be members of a regional security complex.” Lake and Morgan suggest that regional security processes have a life on their own and can refract the impact of the global system. Regional complexes are used by Lake and Morgan as a launching pad to introduce the concept of regional order. Whereas a regional complex is defined by its patterns of security conceived in terms of externalities, a regional order is characterized by the way in which the states that comprise a regional complex manage their security relations. And the typology put forward by Lake and Morgan includes (1) balance of power, (2) concert of power, (3) multilateral collective security, (4) pluralistic security community, and (5) integration.

Finally, another prevalent way to approach regional security is by conceptualizing the evolution of a region as a zone of peace. Arie Kacowitz’s work (1998) is devoted to explaining how peace can be maintained at the regional level, sometimes even if this process is not sustained by plural democracies. He sets out his study by defining a zone of peace as

a discrete geographical region of the world in which a group of states have maintained peaceful relations among themselves for a period of at least thirty years—a generation span—though civil wars, domestic unrest, and violence might still occur within their borders, as well as international conflicts and crisis between them.

Furthermore, within this definition he differentiates among three different categories of zones of peace in an ascending order of quality and endurance: zones of negative or precarious peace, zones of stable peace, and, finally, pluralistic security communities. To explain the maintenance of regional peace, he assesses the necessary, favorable, and sufficient conditions drawing from a pool of realist/geopolitical and liberal theories: (1) regional hegemony; (2) regional balance of power; (3) common threat by a third party; (4) isolation, irrelevance, and impotence; (4) regional democracy; (5) economic development and prosperity; (6) economic interdependence, integration, and transnational links; (7) normative consensus/ common cultural background; and, finally, (8) satisfaction with the territorial status quo.

Bibliography:

Buzan, Barry, and Ole Wæver. Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Kacowicz, Arie M. Zones of Peace in the Third World: South America and West Africa in Comparative Perspective. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Lake, David, and Patrick Morgan. Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Tavares, Rodrigo. Regional Security: The Capacity of International Organizations. London: Routledge, 2009.

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