ABSTRACT
The region's international organizations (IOs) are clearly deeply connected to the region's environment but have also been inspired by other attempts at regionalism, and in the case of the Arab League by the discussions and drafts that led to the formal creation of the UN just a few months after the League's foundation in 1945. Viewing the region's IOs through the prisms of realism and neoliberal institutionalism alone clearly creates path dependencies, which then fail to capture the range of dynamics on display. The four-stage framework was explicitly designed to force people to examine the Middle East's three IOs through a range of prisms in order to give them the tools to see their efforts in the round, namely Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Arab League and the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU). The four-stage framework is regional environment, multiple purposes that IOs play in international relations, theories of international organizations and organizational goals and achievements.
