In 2003, Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver published Regions and Powers, one of the most influential attempts to explain how security works at the level of regions. Their answer is Regional Security Complex Theory, usually shortened to RSCT.
What is a security complex?
The starting point is simple: most threats travel more easily over short distances than long ones. States therefore worry most about their neighbours, and their security concerns become bound up with one another. A regional security complex is a group of states whose security problems are so interlinked that they cannot sensibly be analysed apart. South Asia, with India and Pakistan at its centre, is a familiar example.
And what is an insulator?
Between complexes, RSCT identifies insulators: states that sit on the boundary between two or more complexes, facing in several directions but absorbing rather than transmitting their dynamics. Afghanistan is one of the theory’s examples, placed between South Asia, the Middle East and the post-Soviet space of Central Asia.1
An insulator is supposed to stop the current. Afghanistan, I argue, has often been where the current starts.
Why the label matters
Labels shape analysis. If Afghanistan is treated as a buffer, what happens inside it looks like a local story, and the security of its neighbours can be studied without it. My research asks what changes if we read it instead as an instigator: a source of dynamics that travel outward into the complexes around it.
What comes next
This is the question I am taking into doctoral research. In the next part of this series, I look at how that outward current reaches each of Afghanistan’s neighbours.
