ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of, first, Karl Deutsch's concept of pluralistic security communities and, second, recent developments in international relations theory that point toward a reintroduction of the sociological theorizing that was a hallmark of Deutsch's approach to international politics. It offers the conceptual architecture for organizing the causal processes that create a security community. The chapter focuses on the conditions under which the development of a community produces dependable expectations of peaceful change. It also offers a highly stylized, three-stage model for the formation of a security community with a corresponding set of indicators and then advances a set of research questions that derive from research scholars' conceptualization and process-oriented model. The chapter aims to clarify key issues, to raise critical questions, and to point to future directions for doing comparative and historical research on security communities.
