ABSTRACT
As the number and scope of regional organizations have spread since the end of the Cold War, the way regional organizations conceptualize security and practice their collective duties has become a focus of attention of scholars. The prolific literature on the governance of regional organizations has shed some light on their institutional mechanisms and autonomy (Acharya and Johnston 2007, Tavares 2009, Laursen 2010), the variety of security governance policies (Kirchner and Sperling 2007a, 2007b, Kirchner and Dominguez 2011), the conditions to become significant actors in regional and global governance (Dorussen and Kirchner 2012) and the capacity of member states to enable regional organizations to produce collective security goods, particularly in the case of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO; Olson and Zeckhauser 1966, Sandler and Hartley 2001, Shimizu and Sandler 2002) and the European Union (EU; Dorussen et al. 2009). While the research agenda of the security governance of regional organizations has produced significant contributions, some scholars (Christou et al. 2012) rightly argue that it is still necessary to advance systematic comparisons and to strengthen the methodological foundations of the security research in the analysis of security governance.
