ABSTRACT
The overarching ambition of this book has been to gain insight into the nature of regional powers, as well as to provide a typology that can assist the comparison of cases across different geographic areas, or across time. To this end, regional powerhood has been classified as an umbrella term for the various roles that can be assumed by a materially preponderant state within a defined regional space. More specifically, the concepts of regional domination, regional hegemony and regional detachment have been developed to highlight the possible roles that a regional power might play, by deducing their constitutive characteristics from existing theories and from understandings of both hegemony and regions. This analytical framework was then applied to two case studies, South Africa and India, and therein to a total of six within-case studies. The suggested conceptualization of regional powerhood has indeed been conducive to a systematic comparison of these two actors, both of whose regional and global foreign policies have been subjected to substantial scrutiny in recent years. The review of the existing literature on regional powers has laid bare the fact that there has hitherto been scant reflection on the conceptual tools or groundwork employed in the analysis of these increasingly important actors in global politics. Often the assumption seems to have been that global theories, such as the THS, can be simply transferred to sub-systems or regions; however, both the theoretical and the empirical aspects of this research have shown the fallacy of this approach. The methodology used to construct the regional power typology was based on Gary Goertz’ recommendations for developing three-level concepts (Goertz 2006). This approach has permitted the discernment of different types of regional powers by focusing on the conceptual boundaries between regional hegemons and two other ideal types of regional powerhood, characterized either by dominating, coercive behaviour or by detachment from the region.
