MACMILLAN Re-Evaluating Regional Organizations: Behind the Smokescreen of Official Mandates

Product Description This book re-evaluates the regional organizations landscape and discusses how organizations with similar mandates can exercise strikingly different goals. Even economic organizations, which do not produce any outcomes in terms of economic cooperation, can be valuable for their members or individual stakeholders. The book’s argument is supported by a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. It employs a novel dataset of 60 regional organizations to establish correlations between members’ goals and their characteristics. More than a dozen case studies in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and post-Soviet Eurasia illustrate the theoretic arguments of how particular types of regional organizations come into existence and evolve. Finally, the book examines the remarkable resilience of regional organizations and considers the conditions under which the stakeholders are willing to abandon support. Review “This book represents a highly detailed accounting of regional integration around the world. The authors ask important questions regarding regional organizations' goal setting and persistence. The reader is treated to an excellent review of theory and meticulous testing of hypotheses. The data-driven conclusions strongly add to our understanding of state cooperation.” (Professor Gaspare Genna, University of Texas at El Paso, U.S.A.) “Vinokurov and Libman provide an invaluable comparative analysis of the proliferating jumble of regional economic organizations around the globe. Combining theory with qualitative and quantitative data, the authors offer a thorough guidebook to one of the most important developments in international political economy and regionalism.” (Professor Harley Balzer, Georgetown University, U.S.A.) From the Back Cover This book takes a mixed-methods approach to completely re-evaluate the regional organizations landscape. Based on a systematic categorization of heterogeneous goals, it identifies several regional organizations in various parts of the world (Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and post-Soviet Eurasia) to illustrate the most typical cases of how particular types of regional organizations come into existence and evolve. Chapters use a novel large-N dataset of more than sixty regional organizations to establish correlations between members’ goals and their characteristics. Finally, it examines the few cases of formal dissolution of regional organizations in the last fifty years to consider the conditions under which all stakeholders are willing to abandon their support for regional organizations. About the Author Dr. Evgeny Vinokurov is the Director of the Centre for Integration Studies at the Eurasian Development Bank, St. Petersburg, Russia. He has collaborated with various international organizations, including the UN, UNDP, UNESCAP, EU, ASEAN, CIS, EAEU, World Bank, EBRD, ADB, and IDB. Prof. Dr. Alexander Libman is a Professor at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. He is also Associate Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow), and Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Russian Studies of the East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.