This book presents an overview and explores the distinctive but intersecting trajectories of regionalization and global governance. It surveys: *the theoretical debates; *the economic dimensions: multinationals, trade and investment, and labour; *the security considerations: armed conflict, conflict prevention and peacekeeping and non-traditional security in Asia; * the governing structures: managing contemporary multilevel architecture and cultural policy, leadership and the L20.

Outside observers were both surprised and dismayed by the loud applause Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe received at the start of the 27th summit of heads of state and government of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) last month in Zambia's capital, Lusaka.

The third annual meeting of President Bush, Prime Minister Harper and Mexican President Calderón on the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) came to a close yesterday in Montebello, Qué. Launched in 2005, the SPP process is designed to facilitate discussion on future economic arrangements for the creation of a single North American market for goods and services and shared strategies for securitizing the continent against potential terrorist attacks.

East Asia is witnessing the emergence of an informal monetary system which focuses on self-insurance, through its own reserve accumulation, and co-insurance, through swaps. The former is concentrated in a small number of large countries (China, Japan and Korea), while the latter involves informal monetary cooperation among monetary authorities in a large number of countries. The origins of this system lie in the Asian financial crises, and reflect concerns both to avoid repetition of similar events and any spread of further crises through contagion effects. This paper first characterizes and documents this emerging system, describing how it works and what its objectives are, and then discusses its performance, its incompleteness, and assesses the system's ability to move towards deeper integration without adopting a single monetary authority as well as the impediments it faces. What is clear is that this type of system among individual countries is incomplete and falls well short of complete monetary integration, but at present it performs well even if it experiences a number of deficiencies. Most countries seem better off with partial reserve pooling, while incremental gains from higher degrees of pooling in the region tend to be small.