This book re-evaluates the regional organizations landscape and discusses how organizations
with similar mandates can exercise strikingly different goals. Even economic organizations
which do not produce any outcomes in terms of economic cooperation can be valuable for their
members or individual stakeholders. The book's argument is supported by a combination of
quantitative and qualitative methods. It employs a novel dataset of 60 regional organizations
to establish correlations between members' goals and their characteristics. More than a dozen
case studies in Latin America Africa Middle East Southeast Asia and post-Soviet Eurasia
illustrate the theoretic arguments of how particular types of regional organizations come into
existence and evolve. Finally the book examines the remarkable resilience of regional
organizations and considers the conditions under which the stakeholders are willing to abandon
support.
