ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with the disciplinary (IR’s neo-institutionalist turn) and contextual (perceived decline of America’s hegemonic position since the 1970s) factors facilitating the emergence of Regime Theory, to foreground the efforts of Robert Keohane, Stephen Krasner, Kenneth Oye, John Ruggie, Volker Rittberger and Michael Zürn, to define and account for regimes; details Keohane and Nye’s ‘four roughly-sketched models’ that can avowedly explain changes in regimes according to contextual requirements; shows how although Keohane and Nye enquired ‘how and why institutions alter the behavior of states’, they left its explanation to a ‘broadening inductive mode’ rather than a ‘micro-foundationally grounded’ one, but in AH sought to develop a rigorous theoretical answer to this question, if only to formulate ‘the problem of cooperation in a more tractable form’. The chapter shows how to stabilize international cooperation even against the backdrop of states’ shared interests in the context of interdependence, Keohane referred to the game theoretic concept of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the arguments of Mancur Olson, Jr. regarding the ‘logic of collective action’. It also delineates Young, Hopkins and Puchala’s Groatian viewpoint on regimes, and others’ ‘modified structural’ viewpoint sharing Krasner’s assumption of regimes as intervening variables, and detailing of five causal variables that account for their rise. The chapter pits against Keohane’s contestations a slew of competing theories that emerged in the vibrant debate in the 1980s around Keohane’s version, summarizes criticisms of Regime Theory, from neorealist, social constructivist and Foucauldian perspectives, to finally argue for a synthetic approach.
