Flexible Frameworks, Beyond Borders. Understanding Regional Dynamics to Enhance Cooperative Security

As of 2014, the post-Cold War illusion of a more secure world has long given way to a gloomy perception of both the present and the future. It has never been so clear as in the past few years that challenges to international security emerge from several different fields (environmental, political, social, economic, etc), touch simultaneously on a wide range of geographic areas and involve different types of actors – from states to transnational and national terrorism, from organized crime to other non-state actors). In this transformed scenario, the regional dimension of security continues to be of utmost importance, even if regional and interregional dynamics have changed with respect to the past. Regions are the context in which cooperative communities can be created and stabilized over time (in the form of "Security Communities" for instance), the areas in which there is a higher interdependence in terms of security concerns ("Security Complexes"), or the areas in which local conflicts are more likely to spread. Regions are also historically-defined entities, whose borders are shaped and reshaped over time by security dynamics. Therefore, it is of paramount importance for an organization like NATO - which has security and cooperation at the core of its mandate - to understand the new and old security challenges by looking at their regional dimension, and to evaluate their interregional and global implications. This volume aims to contribute to this effort by analyzing regional dynamics, the eventual role of NATO in their regards, and possible ways to enhance cooperative security.

Result of the third academic conference organised by NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT), University of Bologna and Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Bertinoro, 15-17 May 2014.