Regionalism beyond state-centrism: African regionalism in comparative perspective
| Author | J. Andrew Grant,Abdiasis Issa,Fredrik Söderbaum,Badriyya Yusuf |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231156136 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essay |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2022, Vol. 77(3) 449–468
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020231156136
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Regionalism beyond
state-centrism: African
regionalism in comparative
perspective
J. Andrew Grant
Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
Abdiasis Issa
Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Fredrik S ¨
oderbaum
University of Gothenburg, School of Global Studies, Gothenburg, Sweden
Badriyya Yusuf
Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
Abstract
Over the past few decades, regions and regional institutions have gained increased
attention in both scholarly literature and policy debates. A fundamental weakness in
both debates, however, is the simplified focus on state actors and the official goals and
policies of regional international organizations and inter-state frameworks. This article
addresses this extant weakness by opening up for a more diverse empirical reality. By
drawing on the new regionalism approach and two illustrative, comparative case
studies from West Africa and East Africa, we offer new insights about how state and
non-state actors interact in both formal and informal domains in order to produce
variegated logics of regionalism that are poorly described by other theoretical per-
spectives. The article concludes by assessing the implications for theory and future
research on regionalism in Africa and in other regions.
Corresponding author:
Fredrik S¨
oderbaum, University of Gothenburg, School of Global Studies, POB 700, Gothenburg 405 30,
Sweden.
Email: fredrik.soderbaum@globalstudies.gu.se
Keywords
Comparative regionalism, Africa, non-state actors, informality, regional organizations,
state-centrism
Over the past few decades, regions and regional institutions have gained increased
scholarly attention as important units of analysis and global “governors”with policy-
relevant influence, respectively. This has generated a welcome body of literature under
the broad banner of regionalism and, more recently, comparative regionalism. This
article takes as its point of departure the observation that too much focus in this lit-
erature has been placed on issues of aspects of sovereignty transfer, political unification,
and policymaking within inter-state frameworks and regional international organiza-
tions (RIOs).
1
The state-centric methodological bias in large parts of existing schol-
arship is strongly correlated with the tendency to focus on and explain variations from
the case of Europe, especially formalistic and EU-style institutionalization—a phe-
nomenon Amitav Acharya refers to as EU-centrism.
2
State-centrism and EU-centrism
travel well together and often reinforce one another.
Nowhere is the problem of state-centrism and EU-centrism more profound than in
the policy debate and scholarly literature on regionalism in Africa. Clearly,regio nalism
in Africa is often conceived too narrowly and through state-centric and EU-centric
analytical lenses. As a result, policy prescriptions tend to be based on wishful thinking
and on the official goals of RIOs instead of “really existing”regionalism whereby state
and non-state actors interact in both formal and informal domains. More specifically,
extant research focuses extensively on the African Union (AU), such as the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Intergovernmental Authority on
Development (IGAD), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
An integral part of this view is that these and similar state-led RIOs are perceived as
“weak”and “underdeveloped”because they often fail to deliver according to their
official mandates. The dominant policy prescription is therefore to strengthen state
capacity or the institutional capacities of these RIOs in order to improve their per-
formance. These state-centric and RIO-centric policy prescriptions are usually over-
simplified and out of context. Frequently they are even counterproductive, since they
1. Most literature in the field is state-centric and/or focuses on the official goals and mandates of RIOs. See,
for example, Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell, eds., Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Or-
ganisation and International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Andrew Gamble and
Anthony Payne, eds., Regionalism and WorldOrder (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); Finn Laursen,
ed., Comparative Regional Integration: Theoretical Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003); Anders
Wivel and Ole Wæver, “The power of peaceful change: The crisis of the European Union and the re-
balancing of Europe’s regional order,”InternationalStudies Review 20, no. 2 (2018): 317–325; as well as
most (but not all) contributions to TanjaB ¨
orzel and Thomas Risse, eds., Oxford Handbook of Comparative
Regionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
2. Amitav Acharya, “Regionalism beyond EU-centrism,”in B¨
orzel and Risse, Oxford Handbook of
Comparative Regionalism, 109–130.
450 International Journal 77(3)
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