Towards a Negarchical Peace

: Security Threats and the Production of Negarchy and Organizational Resilience in the Contemporary World

Abstract

This thesis examines cooperation trends in Post-Cold War security organizations through a development of Deudney's Republican Security Theory (RST) and the notion of resilience. Neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism are the default theories in explaining the interactions among states inside an organization. While neoliberal institutionalists argue that organizations exert a strong influence on cooperation, and arise from a need for it, neorealism sees the organization as ephemeral and a reflection of great power interests which ultimately undermine cooperation. The two mainstream theories, crucially, provide contradictory structural explanations for cooperation when applied to multiple regions. I argue that this because both adopt the flawed assumption of immutable international anarchy and thus fail to appreciate that a new ordering principle, negarchy, is emerging. By searching for negarchy, I consider the organizational characteristic of resilience. Resilience is an organization's ability to sustain cooperation after exogenous shocks. I argue that the operation of security organizations in Europe, Eurasia and South America is best explained by reference to environment and ordering principles. RST provides tools that are useful in providing an alternative logic for cooperation based on changes in ordering principles, governance, the material environment and the desire for security and liberty. While RST is a promising alternative for explaining cooperation, it has not yet been utilised to explain the Post-Cold War security environment. In light of this, I modify RST in order to take into account non-state actors as sources of violence, as well as extra-regional powers encroaching on a geographic security sphere. I also introduce a macrostructural and microstructural model that incorporates exogenous shocks and the emergence of negarchy through the detection of the anarchy-interdependence and hierarchy-restraint problematiques. I conclude that negarchy is present in varying intensity in three regional security spheres. This allows us to account for the dynamics of organizational cooperation patterns.

Date of Award	31 Jul 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aberystwyth University
Supervisor	Howard Craig (Supervisor) & Milja Kurki (Supervisor)