LAUSR

This article outlines a new research agenda for the study of security policy coordination in Europe and North America. Despite the pressure to build coherent regional and transatlantic architectures to face common security challenges, since 9/11 the two regions have witnessed the coalescence of untidy bricolages of policy-coordination mechanisms—regional, sub-regional, and inter-regional; formal and informal; overarching and issue-specific; functional and dysfunctional. These dynamics raise relevant questions about how best to characterize, explain, and evaluate these network-driven types of policy coordination. Building on the literature on transgovernmental networks (TGNs), this article seeks to address these questions by proposing a comparative and cross-issue analytical framework that seeks to capture the particular forms and functions of existing security policy coordination initiatives across the Atlantic.