Regional security communities

This chapter introduces the concept of security community and seeks the place where regional communities meet security studies. The first part describes the conceptual history of security community as the significant development of international relations (IR) theory. Karl W. Deutsch is regarded as one of the most significant promoters of this concept. The second part introduces the recent literature on the Deutschian concept and shows the difficulty of describing and analysing which region and which countries form a security community. The third part then asks whether or not the EU and its Member States alone form and develop the European security community. We point out that we should examine the practices of security community as well as the institutional factors. The fourth part observes the absence of interstate war in many regions while arguing that the development of security community is not yet a universal phenomenon. We examine the Asian case and seek for implications particularly in the Northeast Asian region.