On Beliefs and Regimes: Justification, Causal Knowledge, and Measures of Compliance

This essay links two strands of Robert O. Keohane’s work. After Hegemony and his essays in International Regimes and Cooperation Under Anarchy relied on microeconomic reasoning to place the international institutions, norms, rules and procedures that we know as regimes at the center of the study of international relations. With Stephen Krasner, Robert Axelrod and others, Keohane defined the function of regimes as a corrective to political market failure, anticipating the rise of rational choice methods in the study of politics. Ideas and Foreign Policy relied on sociological and psychological reasoning to consider how principled and causal beliefs shape relations between countries. With Judith Goldstein, Keohane analyzed what would now be termed the construction and cumulation of knowledge in international relations, anticipating though not embracing the rise of postmodernist approaches to the study of politics. This essay relates the nature of principled and causal beliefs to the design of regimes, with emphasis on three themes.