ABSTRACT
The increasingly multidisciplinary political economy' of new regionalisms' is emerging as one way to approach and understand the contemporary global' crisis and its related restructuring/rebalancing. The new regionalism literature challenged the rationalist bias of neo-liberal institutionalism. The three-year opportunity to interact through the EU-ACP Network of Regional Integration Studies (NETRIS) constituted an unrepeatable, fleeting challenge to engage with analysts from the trio of continents in the Global South. The potential of NETRIS was not so apparent when we first met in Dar es Salaam in mid-2009; but it had become palpable by our finale in Addis Ababa in late-2011. The move up from regional to global for the commission on drugs offers an optimistic scenario: the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy has evolved into the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Regional analysis and policy need to take such changes into account when contrasting agency with dependency, resilience with vulnerability.
