Week 2 - Summarized Notes + Flashcards
Conceptualizing Regions: Definitions, Geographies, and Typologies
The Problem of Definition:
There is no universal consensus on what constitutes an international region; concepts are frequently categorized as ambiguous and difficult to define (Amable, 2022).
Despite conceptual fluidity, regions intuitively matter as primary frameworks for organizing political, economic, security, and cultural interactions.
Regions are not facts of nature or immutable geographical givens; they are socially and politically constructed through historical processes, power relations, discourse, and institutional choices (Katzenstein, 2015).
Dimensions of Regional Classification:
Geographical Regions: Delimited by physical terrain, contiguous landmasses, watersheds, or maritime boundaries.
Economic Regions: Formed through shared trade networks, preferential trade agreements, custom unions, or integrated single markets.
Political Regions: Defined by common governance frameworks, shared institutional memberships, or aligned diplomatic regimes.
Cultural/Historical Regions: Bound by shared heritage, linguistic affinities, religious traditions, or historic civilizational narratives.
Security Regions: Defined by patterns of mutual vulnerability, geographical threat proximity, and security interdependence.
Global Institutional Taxonomy of World Regions:
Different international organizations construct distinct regional maps to suit their administrative and operational objectives:
The World Bank Taxonomy:
East Asia and Pacific
Europe and Central Asia
Latin America and Caribbean
Middle East and North Africa
North America
South Asia
Sub-Saharan Africa
* **The United Nations Taxonomy**:
* Subdivides continents into finer sub-regions, including Australia and New Zealand, Caribbean, Central America, Central Asia, Eastern Africa, Eastern Asia, Eastern Europe, Melanesia, Micronesia, Middle Africa, Northern Africa, Northern America, Northern Europe, Polynesia, South America, South-eastern Asia, Southern Africa, Southern Asia, Southern Europe, Western Africa, Western Asia, and Western Europe.
* **The World Health Organization (WHO) Taxonomy**:
* Africa
* Americas
* Eastern Mediterranean
* Europe
* South-East Asia
* Western Pacific
Europe as a Multilayered Region: Historical, Social, and Political Dimensions
Geographical Boundaries of Europe:
Verbatim geographical boundary definition: Europe is bordered on the North by the Arctic Ocean, on the West by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the South (West to East) by the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Kuma-Manych Depression, and the Caspian Sea. The continent's Eastern boundary (North to South) runs along the Ural Mountains and then roughly Southwest along the Emba (Zhem) River, terminating at the Northern Caspian Coast.
Historical and Social Construction of Europe:
Classical Greek Origins: The concept of Europe as a distinct region was first recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century B.C., who created a tripartite map dividing the known world into Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa).
Herodotus's Skepticism: Herodotus explicitly questioned the arbitrary nature of these divisions, stating: "I cannot conceive why three names, and women's names especially, should ever have been given to a tract which is in reality one… nor can I even say who gave the three tracts their names, or whence they took the epithets."
Modern Imperial Construct: Although treated as an arbitrary line for centuries, the boundary between Europe, Asia, and Africa became a central geopolitical and civilizational trope in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Contingency of the Ural Boundary:
In 1721, following its victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War, Russia proclaimed itself a European colonial empire featuring a European metropole and Asian colonial domains.
Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swedish prisoner of war in Russia, proposed using the Ural Mountains as the principal boundary separating Europe from Asia.
Danilevskii (1896) exposed the arbitrary, political, and colonial nature of the Strahlenberg Ural border, noting:
The Urals are among the lowest and most easily traversable mountain ranges on Earth; near Ekaterinburg, travelers cross them without noticing and must ask drivers where the mountains are.
If the Urals separate two continents, then higher and less traversable ranges like the Alps, Caucasus, or Himalayas should logically separate continents.
If the Urals make Europe a distinct continent, India—surrounded on two sides by seas and on the third by mountains far grander than the Urals—has an equal geographical claim to continent status.
The Political and Economic Dimension: The European Union:
Over the past 70 years, the regional identity of "Europe" has become increasingly synonymous with the institutional integration project of the European Union (EU) and affiliated frameworks like the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
Key Structural Indicators of the EU:
Member States: 27 countries.
Population: 449.2 million people.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP): .
GDP per capita: .
EU membership and formal candidacy serve as institutional markers of an entity's recognized "Europeanness."
Domestic and International Contestation of Europe:
National Identity Narratives: France and Germany historically view themselves as the central engines of European integration; the United Kingdom historically framed its identity as distinct from continental Europe, culminating in its exit from the EU.
Competing Visions: Debates center on whether Europe should exist as a loose association of sovereign nation-states or a deeply integrated supranational union, and whether it represents a functional democratic/economic project or a closed civilisational unit.
Exclusion and Outsiders: EU boundaries create structural outsiders (e.g., Morocco, whose application was rejected on geographical grounds; Russia; Turkey).
Liminal Others: Frameworks create liminal entities—actors that are "neither here nor there" (Rumelili and Morozov, 2012):
Turkey challenges Europe's internal self-perception as a multicultural space by highlighting religious and civilizational exclusion.
Russia's uncompromising position consolidates the EU-centered image of Europe as a political community anchored in liberal democratic values.
Regionness and Processes of Regionalisation
Conceptual Foundations of Regionness:
Hettne and Söderbaum (2000) establish that regions emerge through dynamic processes of regionalisation, defined as the empirical process leading to patterns of cooperation, integration, complementarity, and convergence within a given cross-national geographical space.
Regionalisation may be intentional or unintentional and proceeds unevenly across different sectors (economic, political, cultural, security).
Regionness denotes the quality or degree to which a geographic area transforms from a passive object of external intervention into an active subject capable of articulating collective transnational interests.
Regionness is variable and non-linear: a region can possess high or low regionness, and its level can both increase (integration) and decrease (fragmentation).
Five Hierarchical Levels of Regionness (Hettne & Söderbaum, 2000):
Regional Space (Proto-Region): A recognized geographical unit bounded by physical geography or diplomatic convention, lacking significant internal social or political interaction.
Regional Complex: A regional space characterized by high levels of transnational economic and/or security interdependence, where states must take each other into account.
Regional Society: A stage marked by dense, regular interactions among state and non-state actors across multiple sectors, though lacking strong, centralized institutional frameworks.
Regional Community: A highly institutionalized stage where enduring regional organizations emerge, supported by shared normative frameworks and distinct regional values.
Region-State: A fully realized transnational entity possessing strong autonomous capacity to act, layered authority, pooling of sovereignty, and significant institutional power.
Empirical Application: Assessing the Level of Regionness in the Southern Caucasus:
As a Regional Space: Delimited physically by the Greater Caucasus range to the north, the Black Sea to the west, the Caspian Sea to the east, and borders with Turkey and Iran to the south.
As a Regional Complex: Demonstrates high security interdependence due to acute territorial rivalries (e.g., Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh) and economic infrastructure connections (e.g., oil and gas pipelines through Georgia).
As a Regional Society: Low to moderate levels of society-level integration due to closed borders, severed diplomatic ties, and ongoing inter-state hostility.
As a Regional Community: Weak regionness at this level; the region lacks inclusive, enduring local institutional frameworks that unite all three states (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan).
Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT)
Core Theoretical Assumptions (Buzan & Wæver, 2003):
In a contemporary international system marked by the absence of extreme bipolar superpower rivalry, security dynamics operate primarily at the regional scale.
Because security threats travel more easily over short physical distances than over long distances, security interdependence naturally clusters into geographically rooted units called Regional Security Complexes (RSCs).
Definition of RSC: A set of units whose major processes of securitization, desecuritization, or both are so interlinked that their security problems cannot reasonably be analyzed or resolved apart from one another.
RSCs are defined by durable historical patterns of amity (friendship, alliance, trust) and enmity (suspicion, fear, conflict).
An RSC is simultaneously a physical geographical unit (bounded by distance and terrain) and a social construct (reflecting intersubjective threat perceptions).
Discursive Processes of Securitisation and Desecuritisation:
Securitisation: The discursive process through which an intersubjective understanding is constructed within a political community to treat a specific issue or actor as an existential threat to a valued referent object, enabling a call for urgent, extraordinary, and exceptional measures outside normal political procedure.
Desecuritisation: The political process by which a political community downgrades an issue, moving it out of the emergency security framework and back into normal political deliberation.
Actor Typologies within Regional Security Complexes:
Local States: The core regional units whose localized interactions and domestic dynamics generate the primary patterns of amity and enmity forming the complex's boundary.
Regional Powers: Dominant actors within a specific regional setting possessing sufficient material capability to shape local alignments, alliance structures, and rivalries.
Great Powers / Superpowers: Global actors possessing power-projection capabilities that allow them to intervene in and penetrate distant regional security complexes.
Buffer States / Insulators: Smaller states or geographical zones situated at the juncture between adjacent security complexes, acting as separators or transition zones that minimize direct interaction between adjacent complexes.
Analytical Utility of RSC and Regionness Frameworks:
Enables scholars to move beyond binary "is or isn't a region" debates toward measuring evolutionary trajectories.
Illuminates local security dynamics without reducing all regional developments to structural great power competition.
Provides standardized, non-Eurocentric analytical yardsticks applicable to non-Western regions across the globe.
Relaxes assumptions of European exceptionalism by treating Europe as one Regional Security Complex among many.
Theorizing the Emergence of Security Regions: The Nascent RSC (n-RSC) Framework
The Theoretical Gap in Traditional RSCT:
Traditional RSCT (Buzan 1983; Buzan & Wæver 2003) prioritizes fully established RSCs that already display mature patterns of density and interdependence.
RSCT fails to theorize how nascent structures build up from unorganized spaces into fully fledged security complexes, ignoring the indicators signalling their emergence (Amable, 2022; Troitskiy, 2015).
Definition of the Nascent Regional Security Complex (n-RSC):
Verbatim Definition: An n-RSC is a set of geographically proximate states whose salient security problems are interconnected and cannot be resolved in isolation, yet there exists no meaningful security interaction among them and may require an external power to initiate processes of securitization or desecuritization.
Three Core Analytical Variables of the n-RSC Framework:
Adjacency of a Great Power: Geographical contiguity or physical proximity of a global power close enough that regional threats directly impact its domestic security.
Security Externality: Interconnected security threats (instability, terrorism, refugee flows, organized crime) emanating from an unstructured regional space that spill over into adjacent states.
Agency of Local States: The capacity of small or local states within the nascent region to hedge, bargain, bandwagon, or exploit external powers for local advantage.
Unstructured Security Regions and Great Power Penetration:
Unstructured security regions occur when local states lack power-projection capabilities or when geographical insulation prevents dense interaction (Buzan & Wæver, 2003).
Where local states fail to generate internal security interdependence (due to low capacity or mutual isolation), involvement by an adjacent great power becomes essential to spark region-building.
The Hybrid Actor: An adjacent great power that penetrates an unstructured regional space acts as a hybrid actor—simultaneously functioning as an insider (shaping local norms, serving as a regional pole) and an outsider (retaining global interests). Hybrid actors can hold overlapping memberships across different RSCs.
Great Power Management (GPM): Adjacent great powers exercise special rights and responsibilities (Bull, 1977; Zala, 2019) to manage crises, establish spheres of influence, and provide public goods through regionalism (e.g., China organizing Central Asian republics via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization).
Seven Evolutionary Pathways of an n-RSC (Amable, 2022):
Asymmetrical Institutionalization: Reciprocal commitment between the hybrid actor and local states establishes durable amity/enmity, evolving into a fully fledged uni-, bi-, or multipolar RSC centered on the hybrid actor(s).
Sustained Threat Construction: The securitizing hybrid actor continuously constructs or amplifies external threats to preserve regional cohesion and deepen interdependence.
Local State Emancipation: Regional interactions socialize local states to develop internal security interdependence. Local states eventually force the hybrid actor out or the hybrid actor willingly withdraws (e.g., US sponsorship of the Organization of American States later spawned sub-regional blocs like MERCOSUR, SICA, and CARICOM that exclude the US).
Security Community Formation: Fostering durable patterns of amity transforms the nascent region into an integrated security community (or conflict formation if hybrid actors exacerbate local divisions).
Absorption as Subcomplex: The nascent region is absorbed as a distinct subcomplex into the pre-existing, mature RSC of the adjacent hybrid actor.
Great Power Friction and Local Hedging: Deteriorating relations between multiple adjacent powers cause local states to adopt non-aligned hedging strategies (Smith, 2020) or split the space into competing n-RSCs.
Joint Multi-Power Absorption: If multiple adjacent great powers belong to the same mature RSC, the nascent region is collectively absorbed as a subcomplex within that larger RSC.
The Unique (Sui Generis) Nature of Regions:
Regions are sui generis entities possessing distinct historical, cultural, and political characteristics; analytical frameworks must avoid rigid, universal generalizability (contra Lake & Morgan, 1997).
The External Constitution of European Identity: Russia and Turkey as Europe-Makers
Theoretical Foundations: Relationality, Liminality, and Post-Colonial Agency:
Relationality of Identity: Identity constructivism asserts that the Self can never be the sole author of its identity; identities are relational and constituted via interactions with external spatial Others (Epstein, 2011; Prozorov, 2011).
Liminality and Hybridity: Drawing on Victor Turner (1995) and Homi Bhabha (2005), liminal Others occupy positions "betwixt and between" established categories (partly-Self / partly-Other). Liminal actors possess anti-structural, subversive agency through practices of hybridization, mimesis, and localization.
Discursive Agency: Agency does not require intentional, cohesive state plans or overt counter-hegemonic confrontation. It operates as a relational, discursive force—a "guerrilla-type" agency (Kapoor, 2003) that subverts hegemonic master narratives from within.
The Historical Evolution of the Turkish Other:
15th–16th Century: Following the fall of Constantinople (1453), the Ottoman "Turk" served as the primary civilizational and religious Other, triggering papal calls for Christian unity. The Ottomans intentionally cultivated an image of brutal, magnificent power as psychological warfare (indifference to European representations).
Post-1683 (Defeat at Vienna): The image shifted from existential fear to representations of Turks as "deceitful, ugly, and sensual." The primary axis of differentiation transitioned from religious (Christian/Infidel) to civilizational (Civilization/Barbarism).
19th Century Tanzimat & Reforms: Faced with European imperial dominance, the Ottoman Empire pursued Europeanizing military, legal, and political reforms (Tanzimat, 1856 Treaty of Paris admission to the Concert of Europe), internalizing a subaltern position as the "sick man of Europe."
Kemalist Republican Performance: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk implemented radical Westernizing reforms (alphabet change, secular dress, legal codes, calendar) as a performance for the gaze of the West, seeking formal recognition from Western international institutions.
Contemporary Turkish Agency: Turkey negotiates European identity through two main strategies:
Accusations of Christian Exclusivism: Turkish leaders (e.g., Erdogan) frame EU hesitation as evidence of a "Christian Club," placing the burden of proof on the EU to demonstrate its commitment to universal, multicultural values.
Embracing Hybridity: Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and other leaders position Turkey as a bridge uniting East and West, challenging the conceptual binary that treats Europe/Islam as mutually exclusive.
The Historical Evolution of the Russian Other:
18th Century Imperial Emergence: Victory over Sweden and Peter the Great's reforms established Russia as a European empire, shifting Europe's primary geopolitical axis from North-South to East-West (Neumann, 1999; Wolff, 1994).
1830s Westernizer vs. Slavophile Debates: Internal Russian debates regarding European identity played a central role in constructing the very concept of "the West" as a distinct civilizational unit (Heller, 2010).
19th Century Political Other: In the Crimean War, British and French discourses framed Russia's domestic institutional "backwardness" against Western standards of good governance, justifying an alliance with the Muslim Ottoman Empire against Christian Russia.
Soviet Alternative Modernity: The USSR offered an alternative, competing model of universal modernity, combining Marxist-Leninist ideology with traditionalist Russian cultural tropes.
Post-Cold War Exclusion & Sovereign Democracy: Post-1991 exclusion of Russia operates primarily along political and democratic lines rather than cultural ones. Russia's response under Vladimir Putin emphasized "Sovereign Democracy"—accepting the vocabulary of Western democracy while demanding autonomous authority to define its internal application.
Consolidating EU Normative Power: Sakwa (2010) notes: "Russia and Turkey do not challenge the existing world order, but only the place accorded to them in that order." Paradoxically, Russia's Gramscian "war of position" and resistance to EU norms reinforce the EU's self-perception as the sole guardian of European liberal-democratic values.
Course Administrative Details and Presentation Schedules
BA Programme Re-Sit Policy:
There is no re-sit opportunity in the BA programme.
Students who fail the course are required to re-take the entire course in a subsequent academic term.
Guest Lecture Details:
Speaker: Justin Sammon (Policy Analyst; Advocacy and Member-Relations Coordinator at the Assembly of European Regions [AER]).
Focus: Decentralized cooperation, regional policy, EU accession, and AER's Ukraine Focus Group capacity-building initiatives.
Organization Context: AER represents a network of 130 regional governments within and beyond the European Union.
Student Presentation Schedule — Course Section 1 (Mon/Fri 13:30–15:00):
Week 4 (18/9 Friday): CSTO — Presenters: Heydar Safarov, Oleh Behunts, Maxime de Witte.
Week 5 (21/9 Monday): ASEAN — Presenters: Anh Lam, Virginia Cammarata.
Week 6 (2/10 Friday): GCC — Presenters: Brenna Anastario, Rocio Dominguez, Ariana Barani.
Week 9 (19/10 Monday): African Union — Presenters: Leo Kotzmuth, Artur Felix Poltavskiy.
Week 9 (23/10 Friday): ECOWAS — Presenters: Lucas Nahal, Robert de Vos.
Week 10 (26/10 Monday): MERCOSUR — Presenters: Dario D’Angelo, Camilla Angiolini, Kaur Marten Sirel.
Week 11 (9/11 Monday): The Arctic Council — Presenters: Lizi Makhatelashvili, Hala Jellali, Samuel De Lille.
Week 12 (16/11 Monday): BRICS — Presenters: Albert Sole, Tibor Bartfai.
Student Presentation Schedule — Course Section 2 (Mon/Fri 10:00–11:30):
Week 5 (21/9 Monday): ASEAN — Presenters: Jack Kroll, Jack Vincent, Simon Farina.
Week 5 (25/9 Friday): East Asia Summit — Presenters: Audri Ayman, Davide Vitiello, Simon Heimann.
Week 6 (2/10 Friday): GCC — Presenters: Yonathan Friedlander, Giacomo di Pamparato.
Week 8 (16/10 Friday): NATO — Presenters: Gianmaria Labate, Heitor de Andrade Granja, Philip Schroers.
Week 9 (23/10 Friday): ECOWAS — Presenters: Emilia von Saldern, Lena Taskiran, Kaltrine Morina.
Week 10 (26/10 Monday): MERCOSUR — Presenters: Bruna Seleghin, Emma de Crombrugghe.
Week 11 (9/11 Monday): Arctic Council — Presenters: Weronika Borkowska, Zeineb Altonchi, Haifa Khan.
Week 12 (16/11 Monday): WILPF — Presenters: Juana Cordoba, Vivien Angyalosi, Maria Torres Hernandez.