Kratochwil, Friedrich and John Ruggie. "International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State". International Organization, Vol.40, No.4 (1986): 753-775.

Kratochwil, Friedrich and John Ruggie. "International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State". International Organization, Vol.40, No.4 (1986): 753-775.

• In the interwar period, the popularity of the study of international organization followed the fate of those organizations, booming in the 1920s only to decline to obscurity by the mid-1930s. Since the Second World War, the study of international organizations has diverge from their actual success, leaving the academic field dynamic despite the failure of most international organizations (753).
• Although all study of international relations has focused on "How the modern Society of Nations governs itself", the focus within the field has drifted considerably as the field has developed since the Second World War (754-755). A graph depicting the changes in focus is available on page 761.
• The first area of study was formal institutions, referring to a cataloguing of the duties, charters, and responsibilities of various international organizations and using current functions as a benchmark for international governance (755).
• After numerous observation that charters did not provide an accurate description of how international organizations actually functioned, scholarly focus turned towards institutional processes. This work looked at how outside politics and internal bureaucratic politics warped the function of international organizations (755-756).
• Eventually the field has expanded beyond what international organizations actually do to include their potential roles. They split into groups which looked at how organizations generally resolved substantive international problems, possible ways to solve long-term transnational problems, and how international organizations enforce or degrade the status quo of the international system (756-758).
• The contemporary focus in the field is on the construction of institutional regimes, focusing on how international organizations perpetuate or create new regimes. This trend started in the 1970s, when Soviet nuclear parity, and economic resurgence in Europe, Japan, and OPEC caused significant disruptions in the Bretton-Woods system. Despite this, international cooperation remained, bringing to light regimes and norms as a focus of study separate from international organizations (759-760).
• The traditional divide in international relations [IR] theory has been between those who view the world as primary cooperative, like the Liberals, and those who view it as inherently conflictual, like the Realists. The contemporary rational-choice theory in IR claims to bridge the gap by providing a theoretical framework in which states can interact both ways depending on circumstances (762).
• A major critique of contemporary 'regimes theory' is that it is imprecise, with the boundaries and definitions of 'regime' still unset in ways which make for inaccurate descriptive values. Scholars within the field also debate epistemology, limiting the ability of the field to produce a accurate definition of concepts (763-764).
• The standard definition of regimes as social institutions ingraining shared norms of practice and interaction leaves many holes about how we know if an institution meets these requirements. The deeply intersubjective concept of regimes requires understanding actor behaviors, which we cannot do without a concept of regimes (764-765).
• Current positivist models of international regimes fail to account for the paramount nature of norms within the conceptual framework, where a change in norms constitutes a change in the regime. A secondary difficult is caused by the inability to disprove a norm, because it makes probabilist, not absolute claims (767).
• "The concept of international regimes is said to be a composite of four analytical component parts: principles ("beliefs of fact, causation, and rectitude"), norms ("standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations"), rules ("specific prescriptions and proscriptions for action"), and decision-making procedures ("prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice)" (769).
• Issues arise in international governance when the these four elements contradict one another, at which point conceptual conflict has to be solved by foreign policy makers. This is not a huge issue for diplomats, but it makes a contradictory regime fiendishly difficult for scholars to accurately predict (769-770).
• A common assumption in IR theory is that the greater the coherence between these elements, the stronger the associated international regime will be. This, however, ignores other important factors such as the tendency of actors to change institutional practice in that regime. Coherence is important, but so is the likelihood of regimes to remain coherent (770).
• The author calls for scholars looking at international regimes to become more in touch with the institutional realities of international organizations like the UN, which would improve the policy benefits derived from that research. Specifically, studies of reciprocal effects between regimes and organizations would greatly benefit organization design (772).
• The conclusions of already conducted studies on regimes would suggest that international organizations needs to be transparent in their construction of regimes, possess legitimacy as a body and the specific legitimacy in the field over which a regime is being created, and control the forms of knowledge which influence policy (773).