Paper short abstract:

The paper depicts Counter Terrorism strategies of security organizations active in Central Asia, including the OSCE and the SCO. Using the concept of “regime complexity” it scrutinizes the institutional array in this functional domain and assesses its consequences for institutional effectiveness.

Paper long abstract:

The growing density, overlaps and connections among regional security organizations raise the question of how they relate to one another. In fact, inter-organizational relations vary considerably, ranging from cooperation, mutual support, learning or emulation, to downright competition.

The paper proposed for presentation takes issue with inter-organizational relations in Central Asia related to Counter Terrorism. Relations among security organizations tackling these problems are scrutinized, of which (all or most of) the five Central Asian states are either members or third-party objects, inter alia the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the European Union (EU) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

For instance, the OSCE has established the Border Management Staff College in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and the SCO developed the Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure (RATS) in Tashkent. Yet notions, strategies and practices often diverge significantly, as when the SCO and CSTO apply overly broad definitions of “terrorism” and “extremism”. Further, the EU and the OSCE – much more than the latter – link their strategies closely to rule of law reform (regarding penal provisions or the in dubio pro reo principle) and civil society empowerment.

Two key questions stand out in the paper: 1) What regional governance comprising notions of, and strategies and practices against, these challenges, has thus far arisen in this policy field? 2) And how does overlap and organizational interplay affect actor strategies and over-all institutional effectiveness (the ability to achieve established objectives)?

Both qualitative document analysis of subject-related key texts of the five organizations, and semi-structured expert interviews with representatives of these organizations and other ex-perts, are used to gather data.

The paper wishes to make a contribution to the literature on regime complexity which can be broadly seen as one research agenda within rational institutionalism. One definition in this scholarship by Karen Alter and Sophie Meunier, which is used for this study, understands a regime complex as “the presence of nested, partially overlapping and parallel international regimes that are not hierarchically ordered”.

The key questions of the study are why and by what means regime complexes arise from the interactions of actors over time, how they come to overlap, and how their interplay affects actor strategies and regime effectiveness.