This book examines the politics of the relationships between multilateral organizations that have come to play a major role in contemporary efforts to manage international security. Drawing on concepts developed in Organizational Studies, the book starts from the assumption that inter-organizational relationships are the product of contested politics. Politics that may be either more cooperative or more competitive, but which always contains elements of both. This volume focuses on inter-organizational relations emanating from, through and towards the regional scale. The proliferation in the number of regional multilateral organizations in recent decades and their growing claims to represent effective and legitimate frameworks to address security threats and issues has been widely noted. The book is organized into four sections, covering all aspects of the inter-organizational relationships in which regional multilateral organizations are involved: global-regional, intra-regional, inter-regional, and multi-scalar. Each chapter addresses a distinct case study of inter-organizational relations (bilateral, trilateral or wider network), and examines the politics shaping these relations. This book will be of much interest to students of international security, international organizations, global governance and area studies, more generally.

Inter-organizational relations (IOR), the study of Strategic Alliances, Joint Ventures, Partnerships, Networks and other forms of relationship between organizations, is a field of study that has burgeoned over the last four decades, but is fragemented, drawing contributions from a wide variety of disciplines, theoretical bases, and sectoral interests. The Oxford Handbook of Inter-Organizational Relations provides a structured overview of the field. With contributions from leading international experts on their particular areas of expertise, it is an authoritative introduction to its research findings. The material is organized in three main sections. The first relates to research that focuses on particular manifestations of IORs such as industry, supply, policy and project networks, public and voluntary sector partnerships, strategic alliances, and so on. The second section relates to research that stems from distinct disciplinary or theoretical bases, including, institutional theory, social networks, evolutionary theory, transaction cost economics, management process, psychology, critical theory political theory, economic geography, and the legal perspective. The third section focuses on key topics in contemporary IOR topics--or those that will become so in the future. These include, trust, power, development interventions, social capital, learning and knowledge, dynamics and change, and evaluation. About the Series Oxford Handbooks in Business & Management bring together the world's leading scholars on the subject to discuss current research and the latest thinking in a range of interrelated topics including Strategy, Organizational Behavior, Public Management, International Business, and many others. Containing completely new essays with extensive referencing to further reading and key ideas, the volumes, in hardback or paperback, serve as both a thorough introduction to a topic and a useful desk reference for scholars and advanced students alike.

Bringing together a team of experts, this volume sheds new light on inter-organizational relations in world politics.

This unique handbook brings together a team of leading scholars and practitioners in order to map, synthesize and assess key perspectives on cooperation and rivalry between regional and global organizations in world politics. For the first time, a variety of inter-disciplinary theoretical and conceptual perspectives are combined in order to assess the nature, processes and outcomes of inter-organizational partnerships and rivalries across major policy areas, such as peace and security, human rights and democratisation as well as finance, development and climate change . This text provides scholars, students and policy-makers of International Relations with an exhaustive reference book for understanding the theoretical and empirical dimensions of an increasingly important topic in International Relations (IR), Global Governance and related disciplines.

This book makes the case for why cooperation is the key to security within and between states, and for dealing with complex threats and challenges to international peace and security. It argues that cooperation is not altruism or liberal internationalism, rather it is in the self-interest of states. Drawing on both theory and practice, it looks at how cooperation can be promoted within and between states as well as in the global community. It explains the concept of ‘cooperative security’ and its potential contribution to promoting integration against the current of fragmentation. Furthermore, the book explores the potential impact of technology on cooperation. It makes an urgent call for new ideas and approaches to encourage people and states to work together to deal with complex threats and challenges. This book will be of particular interest to students of diplomacy studies, foreign policy and international relations, and to practitioners dealing with security issues.

This book studies inter-organisational relations from a new angle: power. Drawing on examples that highlight how the EU relates to NATO and to the UN, it shows how consequential inter-organisational relations are for the functioning and nature of the organisations, and how important it is to detect the forms of power exerted in these relations. Power, for international organisations, is above all about relevance. In an era when the legitimacy and role of international organisations is increasingly questioned, the organisations have a growing concern for ensuring their continued relevance. Subsequently, the management of relevance is a central part of inter-organisational relations and becomes visible in the way organisations handle questions about their tasks, hierarchies and image. Clear and accessible, the book will appeal both to the growing scholarly community working on inter-organisational relations and to a variety of audiences including practitioners and scholars outside the field of international relations.

This Element addresses questions of division of labor and concentration of authority among intergovernmental organizations by examining multilevel governance in the Global South. It focuses on the policy domains of peace and security and human rights in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and its central finding is that the extent of governance regionalization varies across regions and issue areas. In the domain of peace and security, governance is most regionalized in Africa. In the domain of human rights protection, governance is most regionalized in the LAC region. Given the phenomenon of regional specialization, the Element makes the case for the greater explanatory power of regional drivers of regional institutional development. This Element is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book studies relevant actors and practices of conflict intervention by African regional organizations and their intimate connection to space-making, addressing a major gap regarding what actually happens within and around these organizations. Based on extensive empirical research, it argues that those intervention practices are essentially spatializing practices, based on particular spatial imaginations, contributing to the continuous construction and formatting of regional spaces as well as to ordering relations between different regional spaces. Analyzing the field of developing practices of conflict intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union (AU), the book contributes a new theory-oriented analytical approach to study African regional organizations (ROs) and the complex dynamics of African peace and security, based on insights from Critical Geography. As such, it helps to close an empirical gap with regard to the ‘internal’ modes of operation of African ROs as well as the lack of their theorization. It demonstrates that, contrary to most accounts, intervention practices of African ROs have been diverse and complexly interrelated, involving different actors within and around these organizations, and are essentially tied to the space-making. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of African Politics, Governance, Peace and Security Studies, International or Regional Organizations and more broadly to Comparative Regionalism, International Relations and International Studies.

For almost fifteen years, both the EU and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have claimed to partake in a relationship that is purported to be a ‘Strategic Partnership’, albeit one that is troubled by lasting political blockages. The constraints that affect the formal relationship between the two organizations are well-covered terrain in the academic literature – including by most of the contributors to this volume; however, the popular argument that the EU and NATO simply do not cooperate in any substantive way warrants deeper investigation, both theoretically and thematically. Thus, EU-NATO relations might not at first seem like an under-researched area, but much of the existing literature on the issue re-engages oversimplified and formulaic statements about the nature, quality, and practice of interactions between the EU and NATO. This volume aims to develop the EU-NATO research agenda by pursuing three key objectives: (1) reduce the lacuna of theoretically informed analyses of the relationship, (2) add empirically and analytically rigorous case studies to the relevant body of literature, and (3) point to possible developments and solutions in the 'Strategic Partnership'. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in European Security.

The track record of military rapid response mechanisms, troops on standby, ready to be deployed to a crisis within a short time frame by intergovernmental organizations, remains disappointing. Yet, many of the obstacles to multinational actors launching a rapid and effective military response in times of crisis are largely similar. This book is the first comprehensive and comparative contribution to explore and identify the key factors that hamper and enable the development and deployment of multinational rapid response mechanisms. Examining lessons from deployments by the AU, the EU, NATO, and the UN in the Central African Republic, Mali, Somalia and counter-piracy in the Horn of Africa, the contributors focus upon the following questions: Was there a rapid response to the crises? By whom? If not, what were the major obstacles to rapid response? Did inter-organizational competition hinder responsiveness? Or did cooperation facilitate responsiveness? Bringing together leading scholars working in this area offers a unique opportunity to analyze and develop lessons for policy-makers and for theorists of inter-organizational relations. This work will be of interest to scholars and students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, legitimacy and international relations.