CompaRe

Research

CompaRe aims to conduct and stimulate research on comparative regional integration in Europa, Asia, Africa and Latin-America. To this end, CompaRe organizes conferences and workshops, and CompaRe members contribute to conferences, research papers, publications and reports on comparative regional integration. CompaRe also welcomes blogs and vlogs on relevant topics. On this page, we culminate the collective research projects and outputs of the CompaRe programme.

First comparative textbook on East African Community law and EU law by Leiden University

Published by Brill Nijhoff and written by leading experts including national judges, academics and practitioners East African Community Law is the first comparative as well as open access textbook on EAC law. The book provides a key resource for the research, teaching, and practice of EAC law. It also gives a systematic comparison with the law of the European Union and lessons learned from the EU experience with regional integration

The EU as a model for African regionalism: decolonizing regional integration in Africa?

On 18 January Armin Cuyvers presented a research paper on decolonizing regional integration in Africa for the conference Africa Knows! Presenting in the panel on The European Union and Africa’s knowledge infrastructure, Armin assessed the role of the EU and the EU integration process for regional integration in Africa, seeing how the EU is the most dominant model used to design and support regional integration in Africa. As such, the entire EU model can be considered as part of the knowledge infrastructure in Africa: not only does the EU provide the epistemic starting point for thinking about regional integration, it also contributes, financially and with expertise, to the process or regional integration. Armins paper critically reflects on this linkage, and asks which kind of knowledge infrastructure is needed in Africa to make regional, or pan-African, integration work better. As one mechanism to do so, it asks what the EU might learn from African experiences, and where Africa may leap-frog in the field of regional integration as well.

The Governance of International Courts and Tribunals: Institutions, Norms and Practice

Although much research has been done into the more than 50 international courts and tribunals, very little research has been done into how all these bodies are governed themselves. This edited volume aims to fill this gap. With contributions from CompaRe staff and collaborators, this volume explores how international courts and tribunals, including regional courts, are governed, and which comparative lessons might be drawn.

Publication envisioned in 2022.

Database on comparative regional integration

Although for some regional organizations primary documents and literature are readily available online, for other organizations key documents are less easily available. The collaborative CompaRes database brings together key documentation on different regional organizations including constitutive treaties, key secondary legislation, key case law and main literature, where possible

open access. The data base will provide a pre-determined structure for documents to be archived and shared, allowing Leiden partners and external partners to collaboratively share documentation.

By providing access to key documents the database will facilitate both teaching and research. In addition, the database may facilitate the work of stakeholders, including practitioners, civil servants or even judges in regional courts that may want to draw inspiration from primary law, secondary law or case law from other regional organizations.

Full open access publication expected end of 2021

Edited Volume: ‘Smart, lean and legitimate integration: comparative insights for the EU and regional integration

This edited volume will be based on the concluding international conference on smart and lean regional integration that CompaRe will organize in 2022. In this volume, leading experts on (comparative) regional integration and the regions of Africa, Asia and Latin-America will publish chapters discussing key challenges of regional integration in their respective areas and from their respective disciplines. Co-authored chapters combining disciplines and multiple regional organizations will be stimulated. To ensure coherence of the book and synergy between the chapters the book will be structured in three parts. The first part of the book will focus on underlying constructs of regional integration, including on issues of methodology. The second part will contain multiple comparisons between the EU and other regional organizations explicitly exploring where the EU might learn from experiences in the rest of the word, and where EU integration might achieve the same or similar objectives with less integration costs. The third and last part of the book focuses on cross-cutting challenges faced by multiple regional organizations and, through comparative research, explores potential solutions. These challenges include migration, democratic legitimacy and popular support, ensuring rule of law, effective implementation and fundamental rights, accession and exit, external relations and overlapping regional regimes, economic and monetary union, and regional solidarity and the social dimension of economic integration.