Security strategies, power disparity and identity

This volume asks questions about power in regional international relations in terms of how does power work? what makes it effective? The avoidance of confrontation is a common - and commonly overlooked - pattern of response to superiority. This study looks at the Baltic Sea region, an area still charged with a residue of cold-war conflict and power disparity, in a setting of new cooperative ventures. Each chapter examines the region from a different angle and asks how its actors coped with the new situation facing them after 1991. The contributors look at how governments defined their new circumstances, how they dealt with the opportunity to shift to a new mode of coexistence and collaboration and how they tackled the challenge of peacefully converting their region to a security community. This book is not organized in a traditional country-by-country lay-out but instead by regional problems and functions.