ABSTRACT
We begin our assessment of regional powers with a discussion of regional security orders. First, we examine the topic of international order in the international relations literature. Important in this discussion is both a conceptual understanding of order and the manner in which significant theoretical perspectives view the order of world politics within an anarchic system. Starting at the broadest level of analysis, we translate the concept of order to the regional system. We then explore directly the concept of the ‘regional security order’ (Morgan, 1997; Frazier and Stewart-Ingersoll, 2010) as a significant dimension of the regional order, and the one that is of most concern to the RPSF. In addition to a general discussion of the concept of regional security order, we provide a classification scheme for different ideal types of such orders. These are the potential outcomes that the causal variables of the RPSF are argued to contribute to. Finally, we explore the three RSCs that will be the subject of analysis in the remainder of this study and provide an assessment of the regional security order in each.
