ABSTRACT
In 1989, peaceful change, which a leading realist theorist had declared a lowprobability means of adjusting to major power shifts in international politics less than a decade before,1 accommodated the most fundamental such shift of the postwar era and perhaps of the entire twentieth century: the collapse of the Soviet East European empire and the attendant end of the cold war. Many factors were responsible for that shift. But there seems little doubt that multilateral norms and institutions helped stabilize their international consequences. Indeed, these norms and institutions appear to
be playing a significant role in the management of a broad array of regional and global changes in the world system today.
