ABSTRACT
The concept of Regional Security Complexes (RSC) was first developed by Barry Buzan (1983) in the seminal People, States and Fear and advanced further in subsequent works (Buzan, 1991; Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde, 1998; Buzan and Waever, 2003), focusing on the idea that the structure of international security could be understood better from a regional perspective. Originally Buzan (1983, p. 106) defined security complexes as “a group of states whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely that their national securities cannot reasonably be considered apart from one another.” The concept developed by shifting emphasis towards securitization relations, resulting in the revised definition of “a set of units whose major processes of securitization, desecuritization or both, are so interlinked that their security problems cannot be reasonably analyzed or resolved apart from one another” (Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde, 1998, p. 201). 1 “States” were substituted with “units”—allowing for analysis beyond the state level—and the focus shifted to the interdependence of securitization processes rather than security interests (Huysmans, 1998, p. 498).
