ABSTRACT
Susan Strange made a celebrated critique of the regimes literature in the early 1980s, challenging theorists and empiricists to reconsider the conceptual content and historical development of “regimes” for international politics. In her overview, she found the term to be used in a broad array of ways, allowing a false sense of consensus among scholars over the importance of the new approach by concealing great differences in meaning. Empirically, she found that almost any pattern in IR was likely to end up being called a regime. This had the danger of leading to the reification of what were really just transient phenomena produced by strategic state behavior governed by considerations of power. She said “all those international arrangements dignified by the label regime are only too easily upset when either the balance of bargaining power or the perception of national interest (or both together) change among those states who negotiate them” (Strange 1983: 345).
