Against this swiftly changing background, whose intellectual outcome - amongst many - has been the ascendance of ‘identity politics’ and with it of new, non-territorial and even post-national forms of fellowship and representation, the Mediterranean refers to a heterarchical regional space, whose history, politics and complexity continues to spark the interest of international scholarship. Such composite mosaic of self-images, belief-systems and identities results, as claimed earlier in this paper, in a composite system of partial regimes, each reflecting a particular sense of being and belonging. Arguably, this largely constructivist definitional approach is specific enough to map the peculiarities of the region and broad enough to allow for the accommodation of complementary variables. Indeed, the relationship between complexity and reality in the region can be understood as having developed from a uniquely Mediterranean context. The above syllogisms are themselves testimony to the enduring influence of cultural distinctiveness and civilisational diversity in the politics of regional order-building; with the Mediterranean remaining a divided (social) construct within a transformative globe. The active engagement of multiple actors in Euro-Mediterranean politics post-1995 may thus exacerbate the possibilities for reaching substantive agreement on many good governance issues, including transparent policy-making, economic security-building, civil-military relations, respect for human rights, co-operative conflict management and, ultimately, intra-regional (sub-systemic) reconciliation. As Zartman and Bergman note, successful negotiations change established perceptions of conflict from a ‘zero-sum’ to a ‘win-win’ situation [92]. Partnership-building and a shared commitment to mutually rewarding outcomes can feed into this process, constituting an crucial adjunct to inter-segmental accommodation and, above all, the emergence of a sense of security at the grassroots. Central to this endeavour is the institutionalisation of the EMP and, in the words of Olsen, arguably the maître penseur in this regard, ‘the emergence of enduring practices and rules, structures of meaning and resources’ [93]. This is all the more so, given the need for a new civilisational dialogue to do away with the subjectivist approach that wants the West to act as a universal human rights protector based on fixed notions of democratic governance and a predominantly liberal understanding of political order.