South Africa and Myanmar: Beware the politics of perfidy

The article examines the repressive actions of the government of Myanmar, focusing on its continuing incarceration of a Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and questions the diplomatic route South Africa has chosen in terms of its relations with the country.     

The regional brand: collective image consciousness in Africa and Southeast Asia

States in the same region are bound together by the ways in which the world imagines them as a collective. One distinguishing feature of post-Cold War regionalism is its outward orientation – the importance of the external dimension of regional cooperation. By and large, though, existing analysis of regional institutional development in the Global South does not explicitly conceptualise and theorise collective image consciousness and management. This paper works to address this conceptual gap. Making use of two cases of regional image crisis – post-1980s Africa and post-1997 Southeast Asia – it draws out two primary logics of regional image consciousness: the logic of influence and the logic of resources. A region’s ‘brand’ with respect to (dys)function and international norm (non-)compliance matters to regional actors because it affects the region’s political influence in international arenas and the region’s ability to attract resources from donors and investors.     

Governing disorder: the Australian Federal Police and Australia's new regional frontier

Abstract

The Australian Federal Police has in recent years become an important actor in both the implementation and design of Australian-led state building interventions in Australia's near region of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The article focuses on the recent expansion of the Australian Federal Police as a way of understanding the emergence of a new partly (and strategically) deterritorialized, ‘regional’ frontier of the Australian state. Within this new frontier, whose fluctuating outlines the Australian Federal Police not only polices but also to a considerable extent shapes and reshapes, as one of the primary expert agencies on identifying and managing transnational security risks, Australian security is portrayed as contingent on the quality of the domestic governance of neighbouring states, thereby creating linkages between the hitherto domestic governing apparatus of the Australian state and those of other countries. This allows for the rearticulation of the problems affecting intervened states and societies – indeed, their very social and political structures – in the depoliticized terms of the breakdown of ‘law and order’ and the absence of ‘good governance’, which not only rationalizes emergency interventions to stabilize volatile situations, but also delegitimizes and potentially criminalizes oppositional politics. The Australian Federal Police, however, does more than merely provide justification for intrusive state transformation projects. Its transnational policing activities open up a field of governance within the apparatus of intervened states that exists in separation from international and domestic law. The constitution of such interventions ‘within’ the state leaves intact the legal distinction between the domestic and international spheres and therefore circumvents the difficult issue of sovereignty. As a result, police and other executive-administrative actors obtain discretionary ordering powers, without dislodging the sovereign governments of intervened countries.     

Local actors and international regionalism: The case of the Sea of Japan zone

The Sea of Japan Zone (SJZ) is an area that has been shaped essentially by transnational relations between the localities of western Japan, northeastern China and the Russian Far East. The emergence of this new type of space, based on interlocal cooperation, is a significant aspect of what could be called the ‘new’ regionalism, i.e. the polymorphous and multicen‐tred movement that is affecting international relations today as opposed to its more rigid version of the late 1950s. The shape of the new regionalism reflects the transformation of international relations in general: this particular regionalization process, that gave shape to the SJZ, is linked to the transnationalization of local actors. The idea of creating the SJZ, in the late 1960s, was first an external answer (interlocal cooperation) to an internal problem (uneven development in Japan). It became a reality some twenty years later as Russian and Chinese localism eventually converged with Japanese localism. Despite important domestic differences the need for local actors around the Sea of Japan to look outside for better development conditions made the synergy possible. It produced a new regional entity that needs to be defined and, for that purpose, that could be compared to other transnational zones in East Asia or even in Europe. Their common characteristic appears to be a functional approach to regional cooperation.     

The political rationalities of regionalism: APEC and the EU in comparative perspective

Abstract

The essay is a comparative analysis of APEC and the EU, which looks at the particular sorts of economic orders these institutions are helping to create. It is argued that the two regions display some noteworthy differences that result from different approaches to the problem of economic governance. These differences reflect much more than the relative degree and level of regional institutionalization; they flow from different ‘political rationalities’ that are themselves a function of the very different liberal and illiberal polities in Europe and East Asia. Our key theoretical innovation is to use the framework of political rationality to explain different regional approaches to economic governance; more specifically we argue that the EU and the East Asian members of APEC may be understood as respectively subscribing to broadly conceived liberal and cameralist approaches to economic governance which are in turn reflected in the design of regional institutions.     

Crafting a Region While Intervening? Regional Discourses on Burundi

Peacemaking interventions do not only intend to facilitate desirable order in crisis contexts but, thereby, the participating interveners also struggle to attach meaning to their own position in the world. The African interveners, loosely organized around the ‘Regional Peace Initiative on Burundi’, engender an image of the self that affects the possibilities for political cooperation on the regional scale. Based on a discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of diverse voices from East and South Africa, it is shown that intervention politics increased regional awareness—but not in a linear manner. The idea of a progressive and autonomous East Africa was strongest in the first years of regional facilitation between 1996 and 1999, when the revival of the East African Community (EAC) was also simultaneously being negotiated. This regional impetus decreased with South Africa's more active participation in the intervention, which envisioned increasing its own country profile instead.     

The regional outcome of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement five years down the road: Are external forces playing a progressive role?

ABSTRACT

The Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005 is the outcome of regional and international mediation led by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD)1 and the IGAD Partners’ Forum broadened to include the United States of America, Norway, the Netherlands, Canada, Italy and the United Nations. Five years into its implementation the peace agreement appears to have transformed the war between North and South Sudan into a series of engagements of conflicting nature. Numerous contradictory actions by both the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the National Congress Party (NCP) (the main political forces behind the CPA) have been noted during the ongoing implementation process (Grawert forthcoming 2010; Grawert and El-Battahani 2005; Wassara 2008). Although internal Sudanese forces are the key actors in implementing the CPA, external forces are critical in providing the support and pressure needed for a complete realisation of the peace deal. The New Regionalism Approach (NRA), as advanced by Grant and Soderbäum (2003), is instrumental in understanding this dynamic. This article is based on the result of a study that seeks to examine why positive engagements of external forces are needed for a timely implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.     

Regionalist governance and transnational collective action in Latin America

Abstract

New forms of regionalism are now a central element in global governance. It is sometimes suggested that new regionalism represents an opportunity for transnational civil society activism. I explore this argument through a comparison of processes of collective action in two emerging frames of regionalism governance in the Americas, the FTAA/Summit of the Americas and Mercosur. I show that, while civil society activism has regionalized to some extent in relation to both hemispheric regionalism and sub-regionalism, this process is far more marked in the former. I suggest, further, that the influence of civil society actors in regionalist governance in the Americas is extremely limited. This is due to persistent institutional barriers to inclusion, the practical obstacles for many groups of scaling up to the regional/transnational level and the particular difficulties associated with accessing trade-based negotiations.     

The revenge of the Caucasus: Chechenization and the dual state in Russia

Post-communist development in Russia has been characterized by the development of a dual state in which the constitutional order is balanced by the consolidation of an arbitrary prerogative state. This horizontal dualism has taken root in Russia's regions; and this is accompanied by the establishment of a form of vertical dualism in relations between the regions and the center. Attempts to overcome this form of segmented regionalism under president Vladimir Putin have been undermined by the development of Chechenization, which represents not only the repudiation of dualism in this republic, but threatens to undermine the precarious balance between the constitutional and prerogative states at the federal level as well. Chechenization has its opponents in Moscow as well and its fate is defined by the struggle between the factions at the center. The process of “separatism without secession” is a highly ambiguous one and reflects broader developments in the Russian state as president Dmitry Medvedev seeks to strengthen the constitutional pillar of the dual state.     

Regionalism in Crisis: GCC Integration without Democracy

ABSTRACT

At the core of “disembedded regionalism” in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is an incapacity to foster more representative forms of politics that are responsive to citizens. Instead, elite-to-elite relations are a salient feature that characterises Gulf politics. A radical re-reading of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, applied to the GCC in the first two decades of the 21st century, confirms that top-down management of politics is conducive to conflict and disintegration as against integration, marginalising the agenda of multi-level governance within the subregion. Set against the backdrop of the current blockade/crisis, this critical rendition throws into sharp relief the non-democratic brand of GCC regionalism.