Re-Evaluating Regional Organizations

This book re-evaluates the regional organizations landscape and discusses how organizationswith similar mandates can exercise strikingly different goals. Even economic organizations,which do not produce any outcomes in terms of economic cooperation, can be valuable fortheir members or individual stakeholders. The book's argument is supported by a combinationof quantitative and qualitative methods. It employs a novel dataset of 60 regional organizationsto establish correlations between members' goals and their characteristics. More than a dozencase studies in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and post-Soviet Eurasiaillustrate the theoretic arguments of how particular types of regional organizations comeinto existence and evolve. Finally, the book examines the remarkable resilience of regionalorganizations and considers the conditions under which the stakeholders are willing toabandon support.