ABSTRACT
While we do not discount the profound importance of material capabilities in allowing states to become regional powers, we consider the possession of a substantial share of the region’s material capabilities to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for actually being one. In order to be a regional power, a state must behave as one. The RPSF incorporates three different roles that regional powers can and often do play with some level of regularity in order to have the sort of influence that is implied by the designation of regional power. We do not contend that they must consistently perform all of these roles; though doing so will likely increase their impact on the regional security order. Nor do we contend that they must always do so successfully or in a dominant fashion, though success again will clearly imply a higher degree of influence over the region. In this chapter, we explore the first of the roles that RPSF focuses upon, leadership. We define leadership as the act of eliciting cooperation toward or acceptance of shared objectives and a means through which to achieve them amongst members of a group. Within our regional security focus, regional leaders actively seek to move other regional members in specific security policy directions. They initiate means through which to address common security issues and concerns framing them as shared ones and developing mechanisms for their management.1 They also effectively exert command and co-optive power over regional members in order to generate their consensus, cooperation, or acceptance with respect to both these shared interests and the mechanisms for their attainment. In short, leadership is viewed as an essentially generative behavior, in that it is key to the development of security management structures. This chapter begins with an examination of the concept of leadership, primarily within the context of international relations.2 We next provide a basic definition of leadership as well as a set of attributes that constitute leadership behavior, followed by a discussion of how analysts should assess the presence, nature and impact of leadership within the specific context of the regional security order. We then provide a set of hypotheses about
the connection between the effectiveness and extensiveness of regional power leadership and the resulting types of regional security orders. The contention is that the provision of leadership is likely to have a significant bearing on the nature of the order that is developed, and that successful leadership will tend toward more stable regions. Finally, we examine the variation in leadership provision within our three RSCs of focus. We demonstrate that both Russia and Brazil, unlike India, have engaged in extensive and increasingly effective leadership within their respective regions, though in distinct ways from one another.
