The Puzzle
Given the level of intrastate and interstate violence currently plaguing the global arena, few dispute that security governance worldwide is insufficient. Green Cowles (2007, 47) expresses it succinctly: there is āa gap between the demand for governance and the supply of governance at the international level.ā In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, literature proliferated suggesting that regional organizations in cooperation with the United Nations represent the best hope for conflict amelioration around the world. Former United Nations (UN) Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali discussed this idea in terms of democratizing the international community. He believed that regional organizationsā assuming more responsibility will allow the UN to play a larger role in preventive diplomacy and become the instrument of last resort in conflict resolution. He averred that a multipolar world should be led by a multiplicity of institutions (Rivlin 1992). While early post-Cold War optimism has been tempered by the scope of security challenges and institutional capacity shortfalls at the global and regional levels, regional organizations have increasingly become mainstays in global security governance. It is difficult to envision a contemporary situation where violent conflict would not elicit some form of conflict management effort by a regional organization (Tavares 2010). New relationships obtain between states and markets weakening distinctions between the public and private and between āinternalā and āexternal/regionalā security. Most conventional security threats1 now possess the potential to become transnational and regionalized (Luckham 2007). This having been said, we would do well to recall that the tens of regional organizations are quite diverse in terms of their goals, capacity, and willingness to take on conventional security tasks.2 Why regional economic organizations (REOs) decide to take on conventional security roles is an important theoretical and practical concern.
This study draws upon several bodies of thought to explore this question. Firstly, all organizations are given to inertia and are reticent to change unless forced to do so. Among the organizational change scholarship, the critical junctures and crisis literatures are particularly relevant to considering why and how REOs change when faced with conventional security challenges. Multiple hypotheses and propositions have also been offered within the regional integration and organizations literatures to explain organizational decision making and change. Attempting to bring order to the discussion via categorization, scholars commonly discuss āclusters of factorsā including internal versus external factors, realist versus liberal versus ideational factors, systemic- and power-related factors versus institutional factors, among others (Soderbaum 2003, 16; Kurowska 2012, 7). After a brief discussion of the organizational change, critical junctures, and crises literatures, Chap. 2 organizes the theoretical regional organizational change literatures and pertinent empirical studies into those privileging (1) systemic and other power-related factors, (2) organizational and functional explanations, and (3) ideational and social understandings. It is impossible to provide an exhaustive accounting of factors and discussion regarding each category, however, some of the more salient possible explanations for REOsā taking on conventional security tasks will be outlined.
Employing these categories, Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 investigate three historical cases wherein REOs are confronted with conventional security threats: The 1978ā91 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-Vietnam Standoff, the 1990 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)-Liberian Civil War Challenge, and the 1990ā91 European Communities (EC)-Balkans Crisis. The REOsā response to the crises differed in that ASEAN employed diplomatic means for more than a decade to address Vietnamese expansion in Southeast Asia, the ECOWAS undertook a vigorous military intervention in the Liberian Civil War, and while the EC deployed diplomatic and economic instruments to address disorder associated with the breakup of Yugoslavia, its Member States were unable to agree on a common military strategy and responsibility for ameliorating the conflict fell to the United Nations and then to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States.
A Word About Comparative Case Studies
The case study method is much practiced, but frequently misunderstood and/or maligned. Among other concerns, critics charge that case studies are idiosyncratic, historically specific, atheoretical, do not generate a sufficient number of data points to test theory, and/or their āinterpretiveā nature allows the investigator to draw positive conclusions about hypotheses where none exist (Kaarbo and Beasley 1999, 371). Although much of what we know about the empirical world and much of the work in International Relations and Political Science are generated by the case study method, it is held in low regard by many. The case study is an in-depth study of a single unit of a relatively bounded phenomenon (in this study, regional economic organizations responding to conventional security challenges) to generalize across a larger universe of similar phenomena. The case study method is a way to define cases, not a single way to analyze them (Gerring 2004, 341). While this study relies on qualitative data, case studies may engage qualitative and/or quantitative data. The single historical case study may actually comprise multiple case studies because it may examine several possible understandings, assumptions, propositions, hypotheses, and/or explanations over time. So within a single case, there are a number of possible āNsā (Kaarbo and Beasley 1999, 372ā373).
Case studies may be undertaken for several purposes, among them (1) to describe, (2) to develop theory, (3) to utilize theory to explore some empirical phenomenon, and (4) to explore and refine theory. When employing cases to describe (āatheoreticalā case studies according to Lijphart 1971), scholars seek a holistic understanding of the empirical phenomenon rather than to generate hypotheses and/or theory or to test hypotheses and/or theory. Of course, the description may begin with or be structured by some preconceived ideas or points of reference (proto-theory), but the primary purpose is simply to generate āunderstandingā of the case. Some argue that this type of case study should be further divided into āhistoricalā and āinterpretiveā cases with the former presenting events or circumstances to describe the case while the latter attempting to understand the phenomenon from the perspectives of the actors involved. These approaches are not mutually exclusive or competitive, and both may be used in a single case study (Kaarbo and Beasley 1999, 373).
Case studies may also be used to generate hypotheses and/or develop theory. In this instance, the empirical specifics of the case are examined with an eye to possibly developing testable hypotheses. The type of theory sought will determine the case selected. While the case may be used to develop a holistic, in-depth understanding of the case, the scholar will identify a few salient factors and variables to serve as a foundation for theory building (Lijphart 1971; Kaarbo and Beasley 1999, 374ā375).
A third purpose of the case study may be to use theory to explore an empirical phenomenon. In what Eckstein (1975) refers to as ādisciplined configuration,ā theory and/or a set of hypotheses are used to structure, examine, and/or interpret a particular case or set of cases, mostly to gain in-depth understanding of the case. George (1979, 61ā62) explains that the comparison is āfocused because it deals selectively with only certain aspects of the historical caseā¦and structured because it employs general questions to guide the data collection analysis in that historical case.ā He continues:
Focused comparison also conveys the benefit of avoiding being overwhelmed by a large number of factors to be analyzed.Using a standardized set of questions in the controlled comparison is necessary to assure acquisition of comparable data from the several cases. In this way, the method of structured, focused comparison will avoid the all-too-familiar and disappointing experience of traditional, intensive single case studies in the past which, even when they were instances of a single class of events, were not performed in a comparable way and hence did not contribute to an orderly, cumulative development of knowledge and theory about the phenomenon in question. Instead, as conducted in the past, each case study tended to go its own way, reflecting the special interests of each investigator and often, somewhat opportunistically, being guided by the readily available historical data rather than by a well defined theoretical focus. As a result, the idiosyncratic features of each case tended to shape the research questions differently.
Fourthly, cases may be used to explore or refine theory. Again, these purposes are not mutually exclusive. This present study uses the case study method to gain in-depth understanding of the individual cases, uses theoretical propositions and hypotheses to structure the investigation, and then uses conclusions drawn from the cases to ascertain what is confirmed or called into question in the existing theoretical literature.
The putative weaknesses of the case study method have been mentioned. The three cases of this study allow us to look at several possible explanations or understandings derived from several categories (and levels) of theory regarding a single phenomenonāREOsā responses to conventional security challenges. Given that what and how are always easier to discern than why, descriptive inference deriving from the case study does not always have to assert causal relationships beyond the most proximate occurring of A, B, and C. After all, these are very complex phenomena and it is important to be humble in oneās aspirations and claims. Gerring (2004, 348) writes that āCase studies, if well constructed allow one to peer into the box of causality to the intermediate causes lying between some cause and its purported effect. Ideally, they allow one to āseeā X and Y interactā¦.ā Causal inference may be enhanced by choosing cases that are especially representative of the phenomenon under study and/or choosing ācrucial casesā (Eckstein 1975; Gerring 2004, 347). There isnāt a large universe of cases where REOs were required to respond to conventional security threats. Perhaps the case may be made that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) could be included in this sample, however, although the SADC has promulgated some security-related protocols, its actions have been quite limited in this area. This study includes the most clearly ācrucial instancesā of the phenomenon. The subsequent segm...