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Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World. Edited by David A. Lake and Patrick M. Morgan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. 406p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
With the end of the Cold War there is a strong impression that processes of globalization have become very powerful. At the same time, some analysts have noticed, quite to the contrary, increasing regional variation, especially the regionalization of security, rather than global uniformity. The Lake and Morgan volume on regional orders is a major new contribution to our understanding of the great variety of regional orders emerging in the post-Cold War era. Together with some other recent volumes on regionalism, it serves as a useful antidote to purely systemic analyses and especially to the widely assumed increasing globalization of world affairs. The authors demonstrate forcefully the centrality of the regional level for understanding key developments in the security field in the post-Cold War era. At the same time, this first-rate volume goes much beyond an analysis of the uniqueness of different regional systems. In contrast to many books on regional security, which tend to be mainly descriptive or policy relevant, it makes an important theoretical contribution by linking useful general concepts and theories from the international relations field with crucial questions of regional security.
The volume develops the conceptualization of a region, presents a typology of regional security orders, and identifies key independent variables that explain important aspects of regional security. Yet, there is still a long way to go toward the development of a coherent theory of regional orders, especially one that makes sense of the linkages between the global system, on the one hand, and regional/domestic factors, on the other, and their combined influence on regional war and peace. Indeed, without a theory of regional war and peace, it is difficult to evaluate the utility of different conflictmanagement mechanisms and the conditions for their effectiveness.
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