Latin America’s new regional architecture : a cooperative or segmented regional governance complex?

In Latin America the repercussions of the proliferation and overlapping of regional organizations are discussed widely. This article examines the opposing views on this process. Some authors postulate that an exhaustion of integration in Latin America will end up in segmented regionalism and hemispheric disintegration. Others endorse a variable geometry of integration that facilitates intraregional cooperation and minimizes the risk of veto players and zero-sum politics. The article takes Latin America as a vantage point to analyse the topic of interacting and overlapping regional organizations from a more general perspective. It asks about the conditions under which the proliferation and overlapping of regional organizations might have positive or negative effects (on regional integration and cooperation). Additionally, it advocates broadening the analytical focus and replacing the analytical concepts of regional integration and cooperation with the analytical concept of regional governance. Regional governance more adequately captures and integrates different patterns of regional cooperation and different regional projects that result in overlapping regional organizations. Instead of looking at the proliferation of regional organizations from a perspective of fragmentation, this article contends that the focus should be redirected to analysing how different regional organizations interact. Regional interaction patterns can vary between synergistic, cooperative, conflictive, or segmented regional governance (complexes). In an initial application of this analytical scheme, the article summarizes the changing regional cooperation patterns in South America since 1990. In the conclusions it outlines some preliminary ideas for a future research agenda on regional governance (complexes)

Whither the push and pull for integration : taking stock of Latin America’s declaratory regionalism

Repeated setbacks to a regional project in Latin America have given rise to a narrative portraying the region’s integration endeavor as a succession of failed attempts. Analysts concordantly highlight that Latin America’s institutional development and actual policy output do not live up to the integrationist discourse sustained in the region, and point to a series of obstacles standing in the way of deep integration. Such a perspective misses out, however, on an intriguing persistence of Latin American regionalism both in discourse as well as in repeated attempts to induce new impetus into the regional project. In an attempt to map out the basis for a more rigorous, theoretically guided approach to the subject, this paper brings the debates on the different push and pull factors of Latin America’s regionalist project together. Based on the premise that forces pushing towards integration are present within the region, it is argued that the dominant hypotheses in the study of regional integration do not address Latin America’s declaratory regionalism in a conclusive manner. The key to the broader picture of the region’s integration gap lies with a lack of determination to let the word follow the deed, and needs to apprehend of the political function declaratory regionalism has come to fulfill in the Latin American international system

Security governance : making the concept fit for the analysis of a multipolar, global and regionalized world

Recently introduced in the academic and political debate, the concept of “security governance” still needs to be clarified. In particular, to make the concept more useful for an assessment of current security dynamics, four main shortcomings need to be overcome: in the first place, attention has been devoted more to “governance” than to “security”, while greater attention should be paid to how security is understood and perceived by the actors involved in the governance system. Second, the literature is divided in two main branches, one looking at security governance predominantly by/through governmental organizations and one dealing with non-state actors: attempts should be made to give sense of coordination efforts (or lack thereof) among different actors and layers of governance, even when focussing attention predominantly on one type of actor (e.g. regional state powers). Third, the literature (with notable exceptions though) has predominantly focused on Europe and the transatlantic area: an effort should be made to look at extra-European dynamics, also with an aim to evaluate the relationship between political/security culture and security governance, as well as between political/economic development and security governance. Finally, the literature on security governance has been too often detached from reflections over regionalism, while it would be useful to explore further the relationship between cognitive definitions of regional and security dynamics. This is all the more important when considering the progressive emergence of non-European regional powers, possibly interpreting security challenges in different terms and displaying different likelihoods and modalities to arrange coordination patterns and solve security problems