Shahar Hameiri

Regulatory Regionalism and the Dynamics of Territorial Politics: The Case of the Asia‐Pacific Region

This article examines the emergence and politics of new modes of regional governance understood as a form of regulatory regionalism. Regulatory regionalism is defined in terms of the institutional spaces of regional regulation functioning within ostensibly national policy and political institutions. The central insight of this essay is that the politics of this regulatory regionalism can be conceptualised as a system of territorial politics fought out and accommodated across the institutional space of the state. The emphasis on territorial politics highlights the fact that strategic moves within institutional space are shaped by the political context in which the regional and ‘regionalising’ actors operate. From our perspective regulatory regionalism is a distinctive method of boundary control over overlapping political arenas, which brings into play a system of territorial politics within the state. We test this argument through an examination of regional governance in the Asia-Pacific region which is often thought of as being inhospitable to such governance innovation.

Theorising regions through changes in statehood: rethinking the theory and method of comparative regionalism

The study of regionalism is often characterised as too fragmented, plagued by disagreements over such fundamental matters as its ontological and epistemological premises, which also hinder efforts at substantive comparison of regionalisation processes. In this article it is argued that to overcome these problems, what is required is a more rigorous incorporation of such studies within relevant work in state theory and political geography. The key insight herein is that regionalism should not be studied separately from the state as these are interrelated phenomena. State-making and regionalisation are both manifestations of contested political projects aimed at shaping the territorial, institutional, and/or functional scope of political rule. Furthermore, the article also distils the lines of a mechanismic methodology for comparative regionalism. Its main advantage is in overcoming the implicit benchmarking of regional development we find in other approaches. The frameworks utility is then demonstrated through a comparison of regional governance in Asia and Europe.

Capacity and its Fallacies: International State Building as State Transformation

Considerable effort in recent years has gone into rebuilding fragile states. However, the debates over the effectiveness of such state-building exercises have tended to neglect that capacity building and the associated good governance programmes which comprise contemporary state building are essentially about transforming the state — meaning the ways in which political power is produced and reproduced. State capacity is now often presented as the missing link required for generating positive development outcomes and security. However, rather than being an objective and technical measure, capacity building constitutes a political and ideological mechanism for operationalising projects of state transnationalisation. The need to question prevailing notions of state capacity has become apparent in light of the failure of many state-building programmes. Such programmes have proven difficult to implement, and implementation has rarely achieved the expected development turnarounds or alleviation of violent conflict in those countries. In this article it is argued that, to identify the potential trajectories of such interventions, we must understand the role state building currently plays in domestic politics, and in particular, the ways in which processes of state transformation affect the development of different and often conflicting power bases within the state. This argument is examined using examples from the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands.

Good governance and security: The limits of Australia's new aid programme

Abstract This article analyses the Australian Agency for International Developments (AusAID) approach to overseas development assistance (ODA) through an examination of AusAIDs recent White Paper. The White Paper focuses on the nexus between poverty reduction and security in the Asia-Pacific region. We argue that the Papers emphasis upon good governance as the key to poverty reduction and security is fundamentally flawed. This stems from the particular ideological and political conditions in which the Paper materialised. In focusing on good governance and security the Paper neglects more fundamental poverty reduction issues, while promoting policies that are difficult to implement and, when implemented, have highly problematic outcomes. This article examines the Australian-led intervention in Solomon Islands and the Australian aid programme in Indonesia as examples for the shortcomings of the approach articulated in the White Paper. We conclude by examining alternative development policies that move beyond the neo-liberal orthodoxy endorsed by AusAID.

Rising powers and state transformation: The case of China

This article draws attention to the transformation of statehood under globalisation as a crucial dynamic shaping the emergence and conduct of ‘rising powers’. That states are becoming increasingly fragmented, decentralised and internationalised is noted by some international political economy and global governance scholars, but is neglected in International Relations treatments of rising powers. This article critiques this neglect, demonstrating the importance of state transformation in understanding emerging powers’ foreign and security policies, and their attempts to manage their increasingly transnational interests by promoting state transformation elsewhere, particularly in their near-abroad. It demonstrates the argument using the case of China, typically understood as a classical ‘Westphalian’ state. In reality, the Chinese state’s substantial disaggregation profoundly shapes its external conduct in overseas development assistance and conflict zones like the South China Sea, and in its promotion of extraterritorial governance arrangements in spaces like the Greater Mekong Subregion.

State Building or Crisis Management? A critical analysis of the social and political implications of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands

Abstract The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (ramsi), an Australian-led state-building intervention, has attracted considerable attention in policy-making and scholarly circles world-wide since its July 2003 inception. ramsi was lauded by the Development Assistant Committee of the oecd as a model for good practice to be followed by state builders elsewhere because of its perceived success in halting violent conflict and fostering a return to economic growth. The mission has had its critics too, but much of this criticism has centred on whether it was paying sufficient attention to the Melanesian social and cultural context. Such accounts fail to recognise that ramsi should not be viewed as a technocratic exercise in state building and capacity development by outsiders, but rather as a political project that seeks to transform the social and political relations within the Solomon Islands. This contribution critically examines the nature of this political project by focusing on the ways in which political power is (re)produced. By attempting to narrow the political choices available to Solomon Islanders, ramsis programmes have ended up limiting the prospects for a sustainable political accommodation to emerge in the Solomon Islands. The deployment of coercive force in moments of acute crisis, as a way of managing the contradictions of attempts to build a ‘state’ through the production and reproduction of social and political power conducive to this project, reveals that rather than being a recipe for ‘good’ governance, ramsi remains a form of emergency rule.

Risk management, neo-liberalism and the securitisation of the Australian aid program

Perhaps the most notable trend of recent years in the development of the Australian overseas aid program has been its ‘securitisation’. The 2006 Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) White Paper was explicit in linking Australia’s own security with poverty reduction in the near region of Southeast Asia and Southwest Pacific (AusAID 2006a: ix). The connection between development assistance and security is far from novel. During the Cold War Australian governments regularly employed aid to support and nurture political allies. However, the nature of the current securitisation drive is qualitatively different. It could be characterised as a ‘risk management’ approach that aims to prevent the spill-over to Australia of transnational risks, potentially festering within the borders of ‘ineffective’ states, by building the capacity of governing institutions in neighbouring countries.

Beyond methodological nationalism, but where to for the study of regional governance?

In this special issue of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, ‘Risk, Regulation and New Modes of Regional Governance in the Asia-Pacific’, it has been argued that new modes of regional governance in the Asia-Pacific region have become embedded within the domestic practices and institutions of states at the national and/or subnational levels of governance, thereby escaping the traditional focus of the international relations literature on regionalism and regional integration. This concluding article examines the three dimensions of state transformation associated with this emergent regulatory regionalism—shifts in the location of state power, the actors exercising state power, and the normative-ideological purpose of the exercise of state power—and identifies issues for further research emanating from the collection of articles in this special issue.

Governing disorder: the Australian Federal Police and Australia's new regional frontier

Abstract The Australian Federal Police has in recent years become an important actor in both the implementation and design of Australian-led state building interventions in Australias near region of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The article focuses on the recent expansion of the Australian Federal Police as a way of understanding the emergence of a new partly (and strategically) deterritorialized, ‘regional’ frontier of the Australian state. Within this new frontier, whose fluctuating outlines the Australian Federal Police not only polices but also to a considerable extent shapes and reshapes, as one of the primary expert agencies on identifying and managing transnational security risks, Australian security is portrayed as contingent on the quality of the domestic governance of neighbouring states, thereby creating linkages between the hitherto domestic governing apparatus of the Australian state and those of other countries. This allows for the rearticulation of the problems affecting intervened states and societies – indeed, their very social and political structures – in the depoliticized terms of the breakdown of ‘law and order’ and the absence of ‘good governance’, which not only rationalizes emergency interventions to stabilize volatile situations, but also delegitimizes and potentially criminalizes oppositional politics. The Australian Federal Police, however, does more than merely provide justification for intrusive state transformation projects. Its transnational policing activities open up a field of governance within the apparatus of intervened states that exists in separation from international and domestic law. The constitution of such interventions ‘within’ the state leaves intact the legal distinction between the domestic and international spheres and therefore circumvents the difficult issue of sovereignty. As a result, police and other executive-administrative actors obtain discretionary ordering powers, without dislodging the sovereign governments of intervened countries.

The region within: RAMSI, the Pacific Plan and new modes of governance in the Southwest Pacific

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of regionalism and regional initiatives in the Southwest Pacific, driven primarily by the Australian government. There is little doubt that the new regionalism has largely been prompted by the Australian governments realigned security agenda following the September 11 and Bali terrorist attacks, and broader concerns about ‘non-traditional’ security risks. However, what is novel about this recent drive for regionalism in the Southwest Pacific is that rather than constituting a transformation of the interstate terrain, it is primarily aimed at the transformation of the state itself. The spaces where the new regionalism is found are mainly located within states. Earlier forms of regionalism, which to some extent continue to exist, typically involved intergovernmental agreements to facilitate freer trade or establish defence alliances between states. In contrast, the new regionalism constitutes various modes of multilevel governance that work to selectively dislodge the linkages between territory and political authority and/or jurisdiction, building transnational forms of regulation and surveillance into the state. This is not simply a descriptive issue but one that has considerable implications for our analysis of the social and political implications of such regional programs, as well as the kinds of coalitions emerging to support or resist these.