Special Issue: Crises, adaptation and resilience

Despite the debates on the multiple crises in Europe and across the world and the crisis of multilateralism, there are very few examples of regional organizations definitively collapsing: most of them manage to survive. At the same time, while some regional organizations successfully adapt to changing environments and prove highly resilient, others turn into phantom phenomena. Against this background, the Special Issue (SI) addresses the pathways and logics of adaptation and resilience of regional organizations as well as their limits.

Its innovative feature is to approach this topic from the perspective of two distinct sub- disciplines which so far have rarely engaged in a dialogue: EU studies and comparative regionalism. Both sub-disciplines offer their perspectives on the resilience of regionalism. Comparative regionalism looks at a universe of regional organizations, frequently changing their membership, entering long periods of passivity and including countries with very different foreign policy agendas and political systems, explaining different attitudes towards regionalism as such. EU studies analyse the diverse challenges and crises of the EU such as the politicization, the rise of Euroscepticm and democratic backsliding, as well as the reactions of the various actors.

Promoting the cross-disciplinary exchange holds a lot of promise for political science in general. Firstly, it allows us to map the (diverse) patterns of transformation and resilience of important international and European actors under the current crisis conditions. Secondly, integrating theoretical approaches and insights from these sub-disciplines increases their visibility and helps to overcome the fragmentation of the discipline that weakens its policy impact and influence on the public debate.

So far the SI consists of two blocks of papers. Three papers from the EU studies perspective focus on two challenges: one exogenous (the major shock experienced by the EU due to COVID-19 pandemic) and two endogenous (the rise of Euroscepticism). Three papers from the comparative regionalism perspective address two interrelated topics: the fragmentation of the regional organizations (for example, due to the exit of individual member states or the general change of the external environment regional organizations operate in) and the hidden paths of adaptation of regional organizations, when they adjust their policies without formal change of their official mandates.

We invite further submissions from these two fields or neighbouring fields and sub-disciplines. We are particularly interested in contributions that analyse

- how the multiple crises in Europe affect the EU polity and its policy-making,

- the factors underlying the different logics of adaptation and resilience of regional organizations from any part of the world,

- as well as papers that compare logics of adaptation and resilience in the EU and other regional organisations.

We specifically encourage submissions falling into the ‘Literature Review’ format of the PVS and focusing on summarizing literature on the topic of the planned SI. We will consider including at most one literature review paper in the SI.

Structure of the SI (including already presented papers during the AKER meeting):

Editorial Introduction: Adaptation and resilience of regionalism: EU studies and comparative regionalism perspective

Eurosceptic dominance or pro-European backlash? - The electoral salience of the European integration issue in national, multidimensional policy spaces.

(How) do Eurosceptic parties alter European Integration?

Challenges for European Integration in practice – Cross-border cooperation in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Between crisis and revival: Withdrawal threats, state exits, and the future of regional organizations.

Disintegrating regionalisms in the African security complex.

Hidden transformation of authoritarian regionalism: Tracing organizations’ functions through officials’ biographies.

Key dates:

Deadline for abstracts: 15.07.2023

Notification of authors: 31.07.2023

Full papers due: 15.10.2023