Comparative regionalism as a field of enquiry has made great strides in showing the relevance of regional organizations and inter-regional dynamics in world politics, and the influence of the European Union (EU) on regionalism elsewhere in the world (Acharya, 1997; Ba, 2009; Dri, 2010; Jetschke and Lenz, 2013; Lenz and Burilkov, 2017). However, only rare attempts have been made to theorize and conceptualize regional organizations from the perspective of African peoples, which has led to the loss of important insights for the field (for recent exceptions, see Souaré, 2014; Tieku, 2017, 2019; Coleman and Tieku, 2018; Witt, 2019; Glas and Balogun, 2020; Ng, 2021). Conventional constructivist and English School conceptualizations such as security community, regional security complex, and regional international society are Eurocentric and do not meaningfully explicate the fundamental dynamics of regional organizations in Africa (Mumford, 2020, 2021). This chapter offers an alternative conceptualization of regional organizations that incorporates African experiences of the international and their agency in shaping regional politics. The key assertion is that formal regional organizations in Africa are best conceptualized as instruments to build a regional community that will empower African states vis-à-vis the European ‘Other’. A subsequent discourse analysis takes seriously the agency of post-independence leaders as they create regional organizations to alleviate their insecurities about interference from former colonial powers. To show that African experiences can also enrich wider scholarship in the field, the chapter clarifies how the conceptualization adopted here addresses two fundamental problems of comparative regionalism.

The first problem I present as vertical – how to conceptualize the relationship between a region and a regional organization (or a similar discussion, see Hurrell 2007: 130). Theories of regions value both formal and informal processes equally but do not relate them in any systematic sense (Söderbaum, 2003; Fawn, 2009). Regions and regional organizations are implicitly treated as synonymous, with discussions of regional groupings lumping them together under names such as Southern African Development Community (SADC) or Mercosur. However, Southern Africa is not the same as SADC; similarly, the southern cone of America is not the same as Mercosur. Moreover, while regional identity is related to regional organizations in scholarship, regional identity has rarely been related systematically to other questions in the field, specifically institutional design. My conceptualization resolves this by presenting African regional organizations as instruments used to formalize the community-building intentions of states in order to alleviate their insecurities.

Civil society organizations and proponents of disarmament feel they are on the right side of history and morality in advocating for the elimination of nuclear weapons. They see growing support on a global scale to ban the testing and use of nuclear weapons or explosive devices under any circumstances. As this movement gains traction, supporters of the TPNW are mobilizing to hasten the pace of nuclear abolition in an absolutist form. They are actively working to change how individuals and states view nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of universal disarmament through an active campaign of stigmatization and delegitimization.

International organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) present themselves as champions for the rule of law. In recent years, EU member states such as Hungary and Poland have taken questionable measures, replacing the top of the judicial branch, bringing media under political control, changing the electoral system. The European Union has responded by employing the EU Treaty instruments for rule of law oversight. The United Nations are less directly engaged in supervising the rule of law, but there are many documents and policies that confirm the UN concern for the rule of law in states. What is much less obvious is how the UN and the EU think about the rule of law as a governing idea for themselves. The EU Treaty presents the rule of law as something to which it is committed in general. The UN discussions of the rule of law include reference to the rule of law as an international value, and include UN bodies as actors that need to commit to governance of international law. In both cases, however, the rule of law is primarily described as something that states need to uphold.

Although disarmament is required under Article VI of the NPT, there seems to be little movement toward this end. Indeed, a recent review of various nuclear defense doctrines in nuclear-armed states reveals the opposite, with clear evidence of nuclear renewal policies, raising questions amid mounting humanitarian pressures and developments. In an attempt to move disarmament efforts forward, the Marshall Islands raised vital questions in the International Court of Justice regarding long-standing questions on disarmament and negotiations toward a treaty to cease the arms race pursuant to Article VI of the NPT.

In the course of my daily duties as an academic, I am often approached by international relations (IR) students asking me how I learned Arabic during my PhD and what is the best way for them to do the same. More often than not, I find myself simultaneously sympathizing with their plight and then dissuading them from trying to complete a PhD in IR and learn Arabic at the same time. The discomfort I experience when doing this comes from to the hypocrisy of my advice: it's a classic case of ‘do as I say and not as I did’.

The reason I dissuade students from language learning and deep regional embeddedness is because I found to my dismay that learning Arabic and building a nuanced, deep knowledge of the Middle East did nothing to improve my job chances in IR; and in some cases my regional knowledge has been regarded as a hindrance and not a benefit by potential employers.

On more than one occasion in job interviews, my skill set was challenged with the question of whether or not I considered myself a Lebanon specialist only. Furthermore even when jobs in IR were advertised as specifically seeking Middle East expertise, I found this to be a misnomer: universities wanted people who had researched case studies in the Middle East, not people who actually knew the region and spoke the language. In sum, I can honestly say that I cannot think of one example of when deep regional knowledge has been of benefit to my academic career in IR. The only time it comes in handy is when I am asked to write for a generalist audience or speak to the media. Until now, in these spaces alone has my regional knowledge been considered useful and valued.

The Globalizing IR project seeks to include regional voices more fully into IR and move past the ethnocentrism of mostly North American and European scholars.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in ‘the region’ as an analytical category for envisioning a more pluralistic world order. In his book, The End of American World Order, Amitav Acharya (2018) argued that students of world politics should put aside parochial perspectives of regionalism – understood as approaching regions solely from a Eurocentric vantage point. Similar to Dipesh Chakrabarty's (2000: 6) argument made in the case of global history, Acharya submits that the US has begun to decline from its uncontested hegemonic status in the existing global order and that it has reached a status similar to that of ‘European thought’: indispensable yet inadequate. Instead of designing a study of world order around United States (US) hegemony, Acharya advocates prioritizing our study around ‘regional worlds’ to better capture the renewed role of regionalism in world politics as viewed from multiple vantage points. Doing so challenges the structural view of regions imagined through regional hegemons as it has been primarily studied in international relations (IR), which in turn helps us not only to globalize but also to offer a more democratic imagining of IR. This approach also draws much needed attention to the ways in which different regional worlds relate to each other in modes that far exceed the dynamics and limited framework of great power rivalry. In contrast to mainstream approaches that view regions as competing blocs dominated by great powers, Acharya (2018: 100) sees regional worlds as ‘broader, inclusive, open, and interactive’. From this perspective, regions are dynamic configurations of social and political identities in which a variety of actors, including the less powerful, interact and partake in regional cooperation.

The ‘regional worlds’ approach is not only a call for more attention to regions, but also a crucial step in the efforts to bring about a better understanding of world politics by pointing to myriad actors’ differing experiences of and perspectives on the international. Indeed, Acharya (2018: 101) offers ‘“regional worlds” as a metaphor to capture the multiple and diverse but cross-cutting foundations and drivers of global order’. By attempting to understand the international from the vantage point of the regional, this approach builds on area studies, history, and historical sociology, as much as it does on political science and IR.

The visits by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to various Middle East states from 2015 to 2021 have highlighted an interest in a region that had been largely neglected in the foreign policy agenda of previous Indian governments. Some observers have interpreted these developments as indicators of a shifting Indian approach towards the Middle East (Gupta, 2017; Pethiyagoda, 2017; Brandenburg and Gopalaswamy, 2018; Pant, 2018). Others have argued that there is in fact more continuity than change in the determinants of India's Middle East policy (Joshi, 2015; Gupta et al, 2019). Are these developing ties redefining the regional boundaries between two traditionally distinct South Asian and Middle Eastern regions? Or is it problematic to frame these growing transactions in logics of trans-regional cooperation, thereby (re-)producing arbitrary and Eurocentric spatial understandings of South Asia and the Middle East? Are present conceptualizations of the ‘region’ as an analytical category, mostly derived from the West European experience, useful to understand India's evolving Middle East policy?

These questions are not trivial today given the contemporary debates over the role of regions in world politics and more specifically about India's emergence from a regional to a global power. If what distinguishes a great power from a regional power is the spatial scope of its interests and actions, then the nature and intensity of India's involvement in geopolitics of the Middle East must be carefully assessed. India is considered by both academics and policy-makers as a rising power whose reach and influence will increasingly be global. How exactly can we measure this transition from regional to global power? Some scholars have argued that a proto-great power needs to have interests that transcend its home region as well as the capacity to engage to defend these interests in an adjacent region (Stoll, 1989; Pardesi, 2015).

Since the late 1990s, there has been considerable interest in regionalism, regionalization and the role of Global South in world politics, global order, and international relations (IR) theorizing. Prominent IR scholars have called for analytical and normative studies on increasing regionalism and contribution of regional configurations to the world order. Aspiring to go beyond the classical models of regional integration based on the European experience, which characterized early scholarship of regionalism (for an overview of earlier approaches, see, for example, Rosamond, 2000), the studies on ‘new regionalism’ have focused on the challenges to and multiple dimensions of regionalism. Among them are, for example, those that pinpoint different forms of institutionalism, and those approaching regionalism from a number of constructivist and critical perspectives (Mansfield and Milner, 1997; Laursen, 2003, 2010; Wiener and Diez, 2009).

Most of these studies on regionalism have pointed to regional dynamics in relation to and as a result of globalization. The focus mainly on economic aspects has led to the analysis of the emergence of new regions, such as those defined by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and of the regional and transnational role of leading states like China and India. Such studies are similar to those on Europe and the European Union (EU), in that they mainly explore economic indicators, such as economic integration, degree of industrialization and growth. There have also been studies on specific regions in relation to the new conceptualizations of ‘region’ and ‘regionalism’. In this respect, works by Amitav Acharya and Peter Katzenstein regarding regionalism in Asia in particular have become leading studies in providing both theoretical innovation and a foundation for comparative regionalism (Acharya, 2001; Katzenstein, 2005).

In the same vein, other scholarship has explored the contribution of emerging and rising powers to enhancing the legitimacy of the global order through their increased participation and agency in both regional and international cooperative schemes. In this respect, studies focusing on the role of the combined economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) as well as on a range of individual countries, such as Indonesia, China, South Korea, India, Mexico and Turkey, have been commonplace.

A legacy of the Cold War is that nuclear arms protect nations from attack; a stance that supporters of the TPNW wish to change. Indeed, this author would contend that nuclear weapons do not protect nations but actually threaten national, regional and global security. Many advocates of nuclear disarmament believe that the TPNW marks a new beginning; it was even celebrated with the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), at the time, a relatively newly formed civil society organization. The TPNW demonstrates international support to take decisive action to eliminate nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to international peace and security.

The call for ethical leadership in international organizations is intuitively persuasive. We need – or at least, we want – leaders to ‘model’ ethical values: to profess them and, ideally, to be guided by them. This is not simply an issue of public perception about international organizations. In numerous conversations over many years with individuals who worked professionally in the vast system of organizations that comprise ‘international Geneva’ – including senior civil servants in the United Nations (UN) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) systems, civil society activists, members of diplomatic delegations and young interns to all of these positions – I found that many were emphatic that good leaders made an enormous difference. This may be particularly important for the staff of international organizations: many of them come to these organizations with a deep sense of idealism and a desire to ‘make the world a better place’ and they believe that such leaders need to set an example.