ABSTRACT
For the statesman who divines to order international politics in a manner that serves his country’s perceived national interests, a first step must be to understand international order in general. What are the sources of international order? Why and how do states develop and sustain order? Such ques-tions-which are often asked about social units at other levels of social life as well-have come to denote the problem of order. In the study and practice of international politics, the problem of order has been central: because states are, at least formally, sovereign and unaccountable to one another, the question of how organized patterns of interaction emerge is central to the discipline. And yet, in spite of the centrality of this problem to IR, there has been surprisingly little progress made when it comes to solving it. The sources of order-the key to understanding, building, and manipulating order-remain inaccessible.
