Conclusion

Abstract

Following the end of the Cold War, regional organizations once again came to be represented as attractive remedies for regional problems and as the building blocks of global peace. With the growing interest in the concept of identity, the international relations discipline likewise embraced regions and regional organizations as cases of community-building and collective identity formation. Revisiting the Deutschian thesis, it was argued that these regions represent and can evolve into security communities, where states neither expect nor prepare for war against each other. As such, it was expected that these regional communities would become the building blocks of a qualitatively different form of global order, where peace is secured not through a power balance, but through shared norms and identities. Policymakers in regional organizations and member states, similarly, cultivated a sense of regional consciousness through constructions of shared regional experiences, history, and identity.