"Epistemology, ontology and the study of international regimes", in Constructing The World Polity, Rouledge, London, 1998

Abstract

Our discussion is organized as follows. The first section summarizes the immediate antecedents to the focus on international regimes, demonstrating their evolutionary pattern. Section two explores several core epistemological problems exhibited by the dominant theoretical approaches in international relations, from which the regimes literature is not exempt. The third section shows how these general problems affect regimes analysis specifically, and it makes some modest suggestions for how they might be dealts with.