There is no doubt most conflicts these days are engaged by the international community collectively. Thereby, even powerful single states have accepted that multilateral action is becoming the norm, while unilateral interventions are...
moreThere is no doubt most conflicts these days are engaged by the international community collectively. Thereby, even powerful single states have accepted that multilateral action is becoming the norm, while unilateral interventions
are often seen as problematic. The widespread acceptance of multilateral response to crisis comes with new challenges. Who is leading or coordinating the international community in a world which is quickly moving from unipolar
post-Cold War world of US hegemony into the age of non or multi-polarity? Within the last 25 years regional organizations increasingly became involved in security policies and are now key partners for the UN. There is hardly a conflict or crisis in which international organizations are not involved.
What is new is the degree to which these actors intersect, crossing the lines between purely regional, inter-regional and global reactions to conflict. So far we have only few conceptual instruments to properly examine
this phenomenon. Therefore, I aim at introducing the notion of a security regime complex for the study of conflicts and the international reaction to them. The notion borrows equally from the literature on security complexes
as advanced by Barry Buzan and research on regime complexity. While the former has explicitly focused on regional security as a policy field, the later still refers predominately to trade and environmental regimes. In this article, I will argue that the notion of a security regime complex is a helpful analytical category for a number of reasons which have not been adequately reflected
in the mainstream literature today.
