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Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, 564pp.; ISBN: 0-521-81412-X
This book is another product of the Copenhagen School's cumulative endeavours to develop a comprehensive framework for analyzing and understanding international security. This voluminous study builds on the arguments of a number of texts published over the last 15 years, some of which are true landmarks in security studies and International Relations (IR) (e.g. Buzan 1991; Wæver et al. 1993; Buzan et al. 1998; Buzan and Little 2000).
The authors' ambition is 'to draw the complete picture in terms of both a general theory of regional security (with explicit links to mainstream theories of International Relations) and its application to all regions of the world' (p. xvi). In the first part of the volume, Buzan and Wæver develop their theoretical framework -- regional security complex theory (RSCT). This is by and large a synthesis of the authors' preceding theoretical explorations. A comprehensive analytical tool-box of RSCT is then applied in case studies on ten regions in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas and Europe to test the theory's main hypotheses.
Two starting assumptions structure the study. Firstly, territoriality remains the central feature of international security dynamics. Secondly, since decolonization, the regional level of security has become more autonomous and influential in shaping and/or generating the dynamics of international politics and security. The end of the Cold War exacerbated this trend.
These two assumptions are linked by the argument that 'processes of securitisation would be strongly influenced by the fact that most types of threat travel more easily over a short distance [...] and that this logic remained strong despite [...] advances of technology' (p. 461). Buzan and Wæver want to define a middle road between mainstream IR that 'lost geography in its search from abstract theory,' traditional geopolitics that 'are too materialistic and mechanical' and critical geopolitics that 'seem too absolutist in studying only the social construction of space' (pp. 69-70).
The regional security complex (RSC) is the study's pivotal concept. The authors have re-phrased its older definition (cf. the original delineation in Buzan 1991: 190). RSC is 'a set of units whose major processes of securitisation, desecuritisation, or both are so interlinked that their security problems cannot reasonably...