Workshop

"Regional Organisations as Global Players. Active = Influential?"

October 28-29th, 2011

Organisers: Dr Diana Panke (UCD) & Prof Dr Tanja Börzel (FU Berlin)

Deadline for Abstracts: 1st July 2011

 

ASEAN, the EU, MERCOSUR, the ANDEAN Community, CARICOM, the African Union, ECOWAS, SAARC, SADC, OAS, the Arab League, NAFTA and others illustrate that there are hardly any parts of the world in which cooperation between states is not institutionalised on a regional basis. While regional integration has mainly started off as cooperation between its members in the economic realm, the foreign policy component (including but not confined to external trade policy) became increasingly important in the last decades. At the same time, the number of regimes and International Organisations (IO) and the range of issues that are covered have been increasing ever since the end of WWII. Thus, states are often both, members of regional organisations and of IOs.

Against the background of a densely institutionalised international level, in which a multitude of IOs and regimes are operating in many different issue-areas, a multitude of regional organisations on the regional level, as well as overlapping membership and increasingly overlapping policy domains, the workshop seeks to shed light on the interplay between regional organisations and global, international and trans-regional governance. Instead of analysing how states and regional organisations are influenced by the international level, the workshop looks at the other side of the coin. It seeks to generate knowledge on the role that regional organisations play globally, internationally and in other regions. Why do regional organisations engage in governance on beyond their own region? How and under which conditions do regional organisations turn into important international actors? Are some regional organisations more effective in disseminating their
policies globally, internationally or into other regions than others and why? Are regional organisations more influential in some policy areas rather than others and why?

At the moment we know little about the international role of regional organisations. Regional integration research started off as a study of the processes and scope conditions for regional integration to emerge and prosper. The second wave of academic engagement examined politics, policies and polity of the various regional organisations, focusing on the impact of regional integration on its members and vice versa. In a third wave, researchers have started to situate regional integration into the global context, analysing how regional organisations are influenced by international developments as well as international and transnational actors. Little research has been done, however, on the role of the various regional organisations as players in global governance, in international institutions and in regions other than their own.

Thus, the workshop seeks to bring together papers addressing the following research questions:

• Why do regional organisations engage in governance beyond their own region?
• Through which pathways do the regional organisations under scrutiny seek to exert influence on the global, international or trans-regional level?
• Under which conditions are regional organisation able to disseminate its policies to the global, international or trans-regional level?
• Are regional organisations more influential abroad in some policy areas rather than others and why?
• Are some regional organisations more active and more effective international players than others and if so why?
  
  The paper givers are asked to select at least one regional organisation and empirically analyse its role as an actor within the context of governance beyond its region in one or several policy areas. In doing this, each paper should address at least two of the aforementioned research questions. Taken together the papers will shed light on the international role of regional organisations. They will allow for several cross-policy and cross-regional organisation comparisons on the activities and influence of regional organisations in global governance, in international cooperation as well as in other regions. This allows for the development of new insights on the transformative power of regional organisations and on the interrelationship between regional and international cooperation, and shedding light on a blind spot in the state of the art research on comparative regionalism.
  
  The workshop aims towards a collective publication, either as a special issue or a volume edited by the workshop organisers. The workshop is funded by the Kolleg Forschergruppe of the Freie Universität Berlin, which pays for travel expenses as well as accommodation of the paper givers.
  
  Interested colleagues are asked to send a 500-1000 word abstract to Diana.Panke@ucd.ie as well as to Tanja.Boerzel@fu-berlin.de no later than July 1st 2011. They will get feedback by July 10th 2011. Invited paper givers need to finalise their paper by October 5th 2011 and present it at the workshop in Berlin on 28-29th October 2011.