ABSTRACT
In 1986, Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerard Ruggie wrote an article on the evolution of the study of international organisations. They diagnosed that research had decisively moved forward since the 1960s, away from the studies of formal institutions as locus of international governance to the study of political organisations widely understood and their informal effects within a larger system of international governance. Such move was epitomised by the then-recent literature on international regimes. In this ‘state of the art’ article, they however claimed that the existing theories of international regimes were systematically problematic. For they ran on a fundamental self-contradiction: their intersubjective ontology flatly contradicted their positivist epistemology, that is, their ‘model of explanations and the presumed relationships among its constitutive analytical constructs’ (Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986: 771). More precisely, defining regimes in terms of converging expectations assumes a realm of shared understandings which, in turn, implies that there is a significant — indeed for the very definition of regimes, central — component of the real world which is based on intersubjective meanings. And whereas regime theory thus assumes an interpretivist position for the actor in the real world, the assumption of a positivist epistemology denies such interpretivism for its observer. 1
