ABSTRACT

This book examines the politics of the relationships between multilateral organizations that have come to play a major role in contemporary efforts to manage international security.

Drawing on concepts developed in Organizational Studies, the book starts from the assumption that inter-organizational relationships are the product of contested politics. Politics that may be either more cooperative or more competitive, but which always contains elements of both. This volume focuses on inter-organizational relations emanating from, through and towards the regional scale. The proliferation in the number of regional multilateral organizations in recent decades and their growing claims to represent effective and legitimate frameworks to address security threats and issues has been widely noted. The book is organized into four sections, covering all aspects of the inter-organizational relationships in which regional multilateral organizations are involved: global-regional, intra-regional, inter-regional, and multi-scalar. Each chapter addresses a distinct case study of inter-organizational relations (bilateral, trilateral or wider network), and examines the politics shaping these relations.

This book will be of much interest to students of international security, international organizations, global governance and area studies, more generally.

chapter 1|18 pages

Cooperating and competing

Relations between multilateral organizations in international security

part I|52 pages

The global–regional relationship

chapter 3|16 pages

Inter-organizational relations in a nested environment

Regional organizations in the UN

chapter 4|17 pages

Cooperation and competition

United Nations–African Union relations

part II|76 pages

Intra-regionalism

chapter 5|19 pages

Inter(b)locking institutions

NATO, the EU, the OSCE and inter-organizational European security governance

chapter 6|17 pages

Multilateralisms at war?

Competing visions of regional architecture in East Asia

chapter 8|20 pages

In-between Europe and Asia

Regional multilateral organizations and Eurasian region-making

part III|60 pages

Inter-regionalism

chapter 9|21 pages

Networked inter-regional organizational security

New hubs or old hierarchies?

chapter 10|18 pages

An emerging inter-regional peace and security partnership

The African Union and the European Union

chapter 11|19 pages

Inter-regional multilateralism in the Global South

The zone of peace and cooperation in the South Atlantic 1