The global 'financial' crisis at the turn of the decade has accelerated changes in the relative standing of major regions. As both the US and Eurozone economies have confronted a series of setbacks and struggles to find their second breath, so Asia, Latin America and even Africa have picked up the slack and have been able to maintain high levels of growth. The resilience of the Global South questions whether we are witnessing an evolution towards a regional rebalancing or even global restructuring. This responding volume has four interrelated topics. It explores the transformation taking place in/with regard to the financing of development in the Global South and the apparition of new players in the field. The emergence of 'New Regionalisms' in the South and the usefulness of these experiences for comparative studies of regional relationship is explicated. It turns its attention to new forms of transnational governance that are emerging and the role that a novelty of actors play in this 'new multilateralism'. Finally, it looks into the implications of this trio of novel directions and players for analyses and policies.

Contemporary Regional Development in Africa interrogates well-known concerns in the areas of regionalism and economic integration in contemporary Africa, while offering an added uniqueness by highlighting the capacity imperatives of the issues, and proposing critical policy guideposts. The volume juxtaposes a set of ’dynamic’ entanglements - new and micro-regionalism, informal cross-border trade, intra-African and African FDI plus cross-border investments, infrastructure development, science and technology, regional value-chains, conflict management and regional security - with fluid interpretations of regional development. The chapters provide snapshots of the several emerging and complex regionalisms and highlight a set of relevant and often overlapping analyses - drawing on authors’ nuanced and granular understanding of the African landscape. The varied, yet interlinked, nature of issues covered in this study make the book valuable and attractive to academics, researchers, policymakers and development practitioners.

This book is a critical and multidisciplinary IPE of the unequal structures of South American development and uneven insertions in the global order following the decline of the commodities boom. The work explores the extent to which regional development issues are related to merely a decline of commodities ́ prices and/or to the resilience of the historical structures within an unequal world order. Thus, the authors seek first to analytically explore the regional issues beyond the formal limitations of North American and Eurocentric approaches. Secondly, they empirically scrutinize the complex dimensions of regional inequality and global insertions. Aspects analysed include economic reprimarization, the impact of China, development finance, trade and regional value chains, knowledge and technology, regional and transnational organised crime, cities, economic integration and the Global South.

Harmon focuses on terrorism and insurgency in the lawless expanse of the Sahara Desert and the adjacent, transitional Sahel zone, plus the broader meta-region that includes countries such as Algeria, Mali, and Nigeria, and to a lesser extent, Niger and Mauritania. Covering such issues as Islamist terrorism, border insecurity, contraband, and human trafficking, this book looks at the interrelated problems of political and social pathologies that affect terrorist movements and security in the region. A valuable publication, it treats a series of related problems on the basis of a broadly defined area, with a special emphasis on the role of Islam as both a moderating and exacerbating factor. The book has a broader appeal than more narrowly focused country studies that derive from the perspective of only one problem such as terrorism or border insecurity.

The author investigates the agenda for transformation in contemporary African development studies: policy studies, strategic studies, international relations and economic diplomacy. With a focus on the capacity dimension, he proposes critical policy and action-oriented recommendations on how to overcome present and future emergencies in Africa.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution and particularities of regional organizations across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe since 1945. The authors analyze the membership dynamics and policy scopes of 76 organizations, and compare their opportunities and challenges in regional governance. They consider organizations’ competencies in eleven different policy areas, including trade, security and environment, and trace patterns in their development. For those with interests in comparative regionalism, international relations, political science and international law, this is an essential companion to some of the world’s most significant organizations.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial; min-height: 11.0px} This book analyses the main factors influencing the political economy of Africa’s asymmetrical regionalism, focusing on regional and sub-regional trade, investment, movement of people, goods and services. It pays particular attention to the way in which regional and sub-regional dynamics are impacted by extra-regional relations, such with the EU, US, China and India. Because African regionalism is influenced not only by economic processes, peace and security are also analysed as important factors shaping both regional and sub-regional relations and dynamics.

Millennium development goals (MDGs) and sustainable development goals (SDGs) have significant implications for global development, in particular for African countries. This book seeks to assist Africa’s policy makers and political leaders, MNCs and NGOs, plus its increasingly heterogeneous media landscape, to understand and better respond or negotiate the evolving development environment of the 21st century. In this collection of nuanced essays, the contributors interrogate the relationship between the MDGs and SDGs in key areas of African development to enhance our understanding and knowledge of the evolving nature of development. They address issues of governance, agriculture, south-south cooperation in a context of foreign aid, natural resource governance and sustainable development, export diversification and economic growth as well as emerging topics such as the internet of things or the sharing economy, climate change, conflict and non-traditional security. The varied, yet interlinked foci present a holistic overview of Africa’s development aspirations, and ability to transform the SDGs’ universal aspirations into local realities. This book will be of use to academics and students in Development Studies, Contemporary African Studies, Political Science, Policy Studies and Geography, and should also appeal to policy makers and development practitioners.

Despite regionalism having developed into a global phenomenon, the European Union (EU) is still more often than not presented as the ’role-model of regionalism’ whose institutional designs and norms are adopted by other regional actors and organizations as part of a rather passive ’downloading process’. Reaching beyond such a Eurocentric perception, Mapping Agency provides an empirically rich ’African perspective’ on regionalisms in Sub-Saharan Africa. It adopts an actor-centred approach but departs from a rather simplified understanding of agency as exerting power and instead scrutinizes to what extent actors actually participate in or are excluded from processes of regionalism. The value of this volume derives from the inclusion of historical dimensions, its open multi-actor approach to both formal and informal processes and its comparative perspective within but also beyond Sub-Saharan Africa. The chapters offer a multifaceted picture of agency beyond disciplinary divides where the EU is one actor amongst many and where local, national, regional and global state and non-state actors shape - and sometimes break - processes of regionalisms in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This comparative book analyses the development of regional integration parliaments in three different continents of the world. It assesses and compares the expansion and current stage of institutional development of three regional assemblies – the European Parliament, the Pan-African Parliament and the Mercosur Parliament for Latin America. Looking in particular at parliamentary agency, it aims to answer why and to what extent, these regional parliaments have developed differently in terms of their functions and legislative competences? Drawing on new and original empirical data, official documents, and secondary literature, the book focuses on the "critical junctures" in the trajectory of the three assemblies and argues that parliamentary agency has impacted the institutional development of the parliaments leading to diverse paths of regional parliamentarisation. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of global and regional governance, comparative regionalism, European Union studies, legislative studies and more broadly to international relations, history, law, political economy, and international organisations.