Orchestrating Regional Security Cooperation in Peace Negotiations: A Comparative Study of the Civil Wars in Cambodia and El Salvador
By contrasting the peace negotiation processes in Cambodia and El Salvador, this paper argues that although the structural constraints against regional security cooperation in Southeast Asia and Central America during the 1980s were similar, the states in the two regions achieved varying success in overcoming two major structural constraints: the influence of global/regional actors and internal disunity. In particular, it focuses on how the political will and diplomatic skills of Indonesia and Mexico led to their different levels of contribution to the peace processes and their respective achievements. Through this, this paper intends to re-examine a core assumption of neorealism, that is, that structural constraints have a determinant influence on actors' behaviour.