Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. By Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 596p. $90.00 cloth, $32.99 paper. This book is based on the assumptions that the regional level of security has always been important, has grown in importance over the past seven or so decades, and has emerged as especially prominent with the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, neorealists are unable to recognize the increasing importance of regional interactions because they focus exclusively on the global level. Equally regrettable is the fact that newer globalization perspectives are unable to capture regional security relations adequately because they, too, severely downgrade the importance of states and/or assume that reactions to forces like globalization do not meaningfully differ across regions. Consequently, these prominent theoretical schools are increasingly unsuccessful at making sense of reality.