Kilian Spandler

Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel | CAU · Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

This article intends to contribute to the theorising of institutional change. Specifically, it asks how dynamics in the ‘deep structure’ of international society correspond to changes in more specific institutions as embodied by regimes and international organisations. It does so by taking up the distinction of primary and secondary institutions in...

This article compares the European Union's (EU) actorness in foreign financial policy to that of the US and ASEAN. It thus contributes to the dialogue between EU studies and the New Regionalism by putting it into practice through comparative research. It argues that a process-oriented interpretation of the actorness concept can be used to compare t...

There is a widespread belief among scholars and policy-makers that populism has fuelled a unilateralist backlash because of its emphasis on nationalism, popular sover- eignty and identity politics. Although a few populist governments have indeed withdrawn from some international institutions, this ‘disengagement hypothesis’ needs to be scrutinized...

For scholars and practitioners of regionalism in Southeast Asia, the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in addressing regional security issues has long been a point of contention. Some credit the organization for having kept regional tensions at bay since its inception in 1967; others lament its inertia and inability to meet...

National sovereignty may be the single most important variable for explaining the rather puzzling variation in levels of regional cooperation and institutionalisation across regions and policy fields. However, theorists and policymakers are often trapped in narrow discussions about whether national sovereignty has been delegated to and pooled withi...

This article seeks to advance our understanding of the role of sovereignty for regional governance, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). We argue that important insights into this issue can be gleaned by analyzing how ASEAN has responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. Most existing research on ASEAN considers sovereignty a...

The rise of populists to power in many states around the world has caused concern among defenders of multilateralism and the so-called liberal international order. Due to their frequent attacks on established international organizations (IOs), populists are often falsely portrayed as unilateralists. Our article addresses the apparent contradiction...

Why do Southeast Asian states use regional mechanisms for disaster relief? From a conventional functionalist perspective, inadequate domestic-level responses to emergencies create a demand for scaled-up governance. This article offers an alternative interpretation of disaster cooperation in Southeast Asia. Drawing on theoretical insights from compa...

This article offers a new conceptualisation of the meaning of norms in world politics. It starts from the observation that existing norm scholarship in International Relations has underestimated the role of ambiguity in the constitution of norm meaning. To address this shortcoming, we advance a conceptualisation that sees norm polysemy - the empiri...

A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element...

This chapter asks in what way the English School (ES) is a helpful framework for addressing questions that are likely to concern International Relations researchers in the years to come. We draw on recent scholarship to demonstrate the utility, often underestimated, of the English School in making sense of topical issues in world politics. We revis...

Webinar at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) on the article "Saving people or saving face? Four narratives of regional humanitarian order in Southeast Asia" Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIPvNCCev6M&feature=youtu.be Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1080/09512748.2020.1833079

ASEAN member states have invested substantially in cooperation on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR). Despite broad support for the idea of ‘localizing’ HADR governance, the rise of regional agency has in practice led to uncertainty and frictions between humanitarian stakeholders. The article makes sense of these tensions by investi...

It is becoming customary to define the English School (ES) as a group of scholars participating in a common inquiry related to a few central concepts, notably that of international society. Although the roots of the ES are often attributed to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, it is now said to be more of an open society...

The ‘hybrid' United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) was initially hailed as a model for peacekeeping cooperation between the UN and African regional organizations. However, UNAMID soon faced contestation from different stakeholders, and the UN and the AU have now essentially abandoned the hybrid approach. The article reconstructs h...

Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass die variierende Erklärungskraft klassischer Theorien regionaler Integration auf normativ eingebettete Diskursdynamiken zurückzuführen ist. Grundlegend für diese These ist ein Modell regionaler Integration, das Anleihen bei Theorien kommunikativen und strategischen Handelns einerseits und der English School andererseit...

Research on regional organizations in Southeast Asia began to form during the Second World War. Although not always explicit, realist assumptions informed most of this early scholarship. From the organization’s foundation in 1967 until the end of the Cold War, research focused almost exclusively on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)...

The traditional dominance of Western state and non-state actors in the governance of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) has frequently led to frictions around questions of sovereignty and authority. Affected states often resent what they perceive as external intervention, while aid agencies routinely accuse governments of denying th...

This paper relates the varying explanatory power of classical integration theories - neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism - in different regional contexts to dynamics of normative arguing. To this end, it proposes a model of regional integration that takes inspiration from theories of communicative action and the English School. Unlike the rat...

This paper takes its departure in the fact that national sovereignty understandings are crucial for explaining why states chose to cooperate on a regional basis. While there is a rich literature on the nexus between national sovereignty and transboundary cooperation in the field of Comparative Regionalism, it fails to account for the empirical vari...

This paper takes its departure in the fact that national sovereignty understandings are crucial for explaining why states chose to cooperate on a regional basis. While there is a rich literature on the nexus between national sovereignty and transboundary cooperation in the field of Comparative Regionalism, it fails to account for the empirical vari...

Why do international governance structures in regions with a history of colonization often display contradictions or gaps between formal commitments and actual cooperation? Rather than looking for exogenous causes, this chapter accounts for the purported dysfunctionalities by tracing and contextualizing the contested institutionalization practices...

Since the early 2000s, the UN and its African partner organizations have increasingly engaged in joint planning, resourcing and implementation of peacekeeping operations. Intensifying cooperation was a way to address the criticism of traditional top-down approaches in which the UN delegated peacekeeping tasks to regional actors. At the same time, n...

This chapter summarizes the findings of the empirical comparison and discusses the book’s theoretical contributions to the study of regional organizations and IR more generally. The comparative approach demonstrates that structural as well as agential factors shape divergent organizational pathways. While organizational stability and change is path...

This chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological framework of the book. Existing empirical analyses in Comparative Regionalism have not systematically acknowledged that regional organizations have developed over time in a dynamic context of understandings about the rightful conduct of regional politics. In view of this shortcoming, I sugg...

The organizational roots of the EU and ASEAN lie in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter shows that the normative arguments influencing their foundation date much further back, as they were deeply intertwined with the transformation of the institutions of the global international society in the early twentieth century. It reconstructs how the increasi...

This chapter accounts for the different pathways of the EU and ASEAN in legal integration by examining how actors drew on existing regional norms or constructed new ones to promote or oppose legal integration. In Europe, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 with its rules for EU citizenship marked one of the biggest leaps in integration in the organizatio...

This chapter traces the normative discourses surrounding the founding of the EC and ASEAN. Regional boundaries and the relations between intra- and extra-regional actors were central themes of these initial institution building discourses. In Europe, tensions between integrationist and nationalist conceptions of imperialism shaped the debates on re...

This chapter shows that the enlargement processes of ASEAN and the EU were accompanied by the parallel construction of specific ‘standards of membership’, i.e. sets of primary institutions that served as discursive frames of reference for accession applications. Neither the EU nor ASEAN initially disposed of clear and specific understandings of wha...

Major transformations have made global security governance – including traditional peacekeeping but also other areas like post-conflict peacebuilding and disaster response – more complex than in the heyday of the so-called ‘liberal world order’. While the United Nations (UN) continues to claim supreme authority in matters of peace and security, reg...

This book explores the normative foundations of ASEAN and the EU. It revives the history of the two organizations in an in-depth narrative of the protracted arguments surrounding their establishment, legal integration and enlargement. While political actors used norms to legitimize their ideas for institutional change, the complex and dynamic natur...

For regional organizations (ROs) as geographically defined entities, questions of membership often raise moral questions about the very foundations of regional identity. To date, comparative approaches to the role of norms in the politics of RO enlargement are a missing piece in the regionalism literature. This paper assumes that enlargement practi...

In the field of international security governance, new forms of cooperation between the United Nations (UN) and regional organizations (ROs) have recently emerged. The conventional top-down delegation of tasks from the UN to regional bodies is increasingly supplemented by 'hybrid' missions, which are characterized by joint planning, shared resourci...

New forms of cooperation between the United Nations (UN) and regional organizations have recently emerged in the field of international security governance. Conventional top-down delegation of tasks from the UN to regional bodies is increasingly supplemented by hybrid missions with shared planning and command structures. This development does not o...

Most International Relations authors agree that there exists a global international society with shared principles and norms. However, a closer look at this normative fabric clearly shows that, while most states subscribe to certain primary institutions, such as sovereignty, democracy, human rights, and liberal trade, actors from different regions...

Ever since the end of the Cold War, regionalism is on the rise. However, the regional organizations formed in various parts of the world look markedly different. Existing Comparative Regionalism literature largely neglects the way in which regional norms contribute to the reproduction of these differences. Against this background, my thesis aims to...

PLEASE NOTE: this PhD thesis has been reworked into a book, which is now available as "Regional Organizations in International Society: ASEAN, the EU and the Politics of Normative Arguing" at https://www.palgrave.com/9783319968964

This article intends to contribute to the theorising of institutional change. Specifically, it asks how dynamics in the ‘deep structure’ of international society correspond to changes in more specific institutions as embodied by regimes and international organisations. It does so by taking up the distinction of primary and secondary institutions in...

„Im Jahr 2014 scheint unsere Welt aus den Fugen geraten“, resümierte Außenminister Frank-Walter Stein- meier jüngst die globalen Konflikte und Krisen, mit denen sich die Weltgemeinschaft konfrontiert sieht. Angesichts der sich wandelnden Herausforderungen, so argumentieren derzeit viele Spitzenpolitikerinnen, müsse die deutsche Außenpolitik ihre Ro...