Description
Regional Security Complexes are a concept that illustrates Buzan’s big picture theorizing par excellence. It rests on a simple idea (the predominance of regional, rather than global security interactions), it allows a global view (the mapping of regional security complexes across the globe), it combines such a bird’s eye view with minute detail (the interactions between different security actors), and it allows some middle-range hypotheses (for instance, about the likely behavior of buffer states). Especially in its Regions and Powers version, it also exhibits Buzan’s typical approach of combining traditional theoretical arguments (the systemic relevance of regions) with more critical and constructivist work (securitization theory). In the context of the post-Cold War world, characterised by a renewed wave of regionalism, and with many security theorists eagerly awaiting a successor to Security: A New Framework for Analysis, RSCT became quite popular, and allowed analysts to make sense of cases such as Turkey in a broader security context. Yet the parsimony of the argument came at a price. On the one hand, the impossibility to actually chart security interactions meant that Buzan and Wæver had to give up on one of the core pillars of securitisation analysis, lending weight to those critics who had accused them of privileging states as security actors. On the other hand, the quasi-structuralist inclinations of RSCT (and bird’s eye views in general) underestimated the agency of buffer states such as Turkey. This contribution traces the development of RSCT and explores its ambivalence in analytical and normative terms. It links RSCT to the other pillars of Buzan’s work and argues that RSCT is indicative of Buzan’s contribution to the wider discipline, yet also of some of the limits of his oeuvre.
