This collection of essays by former students of Robert Keohane is written as a tribute to his career as teacher and scholar. The volume includes eleven essays on themes that have characterized Keohane's contributions to the study of international politics, an introductory essay by Helen Milner that summarizes his scholarly work and discusses its influence, and a concluding essay by Andrew Moravcsik on Keohane's career as a political theorist. The thematic essays are organized into three groups, one focusing on general theoretical issues about how to explain the development of international institutions and their relation to state power, another on the role of international institutions in five distinct issue areas, and the third on issues related to globalization and international interdependence. Their authors are Randall Stone, Michael Gilligan, Ronald Mitchell, Page Fortna and Lisa Martin, Beth Simmons, Layna Mosley, Elizabeth DeSombre, Vinod Aggarwal, Jonathan Aronson, Timothy McKeown, and Ann Tickner.
As is true of any edited volume, the essays vary in quality and significance. Nonetheless, their common theme makes it possible to evaluate the book's overall usefulness as an introduction to Keohane's writings on international politics. Of course, the book is intended as a tribute, not as a balanced assessment of his work. Even so, there are critical comments about his writings to be found within its pages, and even if it contained nothing but praise it would not necessarily be useless to someone interested in forming an independent judgment of the nature and significance of Keohane's contribution to the field.
In her introductory essay, Milner identifies four distinct themes in Keohane's writings: the role of nonstate actors in international politics (including, especially, international institutions), attention to forms of power other than military force and threats to use it, international interdependence, and international cooperation. However, she identifies them not simply as themes that have characterized the scholarly writings of Robert Keohane but as “four elements of the neoliberal institutionalist paradigm” (p. 5), crediting Keohane not just with important contributions in the development of those themes but (along with Joseph Nye) with the invention of this paradigm. Thus, indirectly, Milner's essay raises another issue about Keohane's work, and that is his contribution to “paradigmism” as a way of thinking about the study of international politics.
A reader curious about what a paradigm is will not find an answer to that question anywhere in the book. As a paradigm, neoliberal institutionalism is defined by Milner mainly in contrast to another paradigm, sometimes called “realism” and sometimes “neorealism.” Since no one in the book clearly identifies the main “elements” of realism, a reader might plausibly infer that they entail a rejection of the four elements of neoliberal institutionalism. A realist, then, would be someone who believed that there were no participants in international relations other than states, that states influenced each other only by threatening to use force, that there were no mutual gains from trade, and that states never cooperated with each other. It would have been useful to learn the name of at least one author who held such a view, but none is given. I cannot think of one. This fact illustrates one of the main features of paradigmism in the study of international politics: its role in enabling the creation of straw men whose defects exaggerate the significance of one's own work.
Fortunately, Keohane's career does not require such artificial forms of support to be considered praiseworthy. To have identified the themes listed by Milner as important and worthy of research at a time when most people who studied international politics focused on international conflict and the Cold War, and to persuade such an able cadre of students, not to mention other scholars, to follow him in studying them, is a major achievement in itself. Moreover, at a time when many people selected themselves into the study of political science in order to write about economic issues without being constrained by what economists had to say about them, Keohane realized that economics already had a lot to say about those issues, and pioneered the adaptation of economic theory to the study of international politics. The influence of economic theory on his work is usefully summarized in the essays by Stone, Gilligan, Mitchell, and Moravcsik. International trade theory (which, as Albert Hirschman had earlier shown, implied the possibility of what Keohane and Nye called “asymmetrical interdependence”), the literature on monetary systems, bargaining theory, the theory of the firm, and game theory have all been mined by Keohane and his students for sources of insight into international politics.
The development of international politics since Keohane was a graduate student at Harvard has certainly borne out the importance of the themes he chose to focus on. Globalization, the proliferation of various forms of international cooperation, and the problem of global climate change have all made the study of international political economy, a subfield that he helped create, a subject of vital importance to everyone.
This is true, however, only because the Cold War turned out to be the long peace, and then ended in such a way as to increase even further the importance of the factors that have been the focus of the writings of Keohane and his students. Unfortunately, the essays in this volume do not have much to say about how to explain those developments, and the closest they come to discussing war and peace is the essay by Fortna and Martin on United Nations peacekeeping operations. If, as Milner suggests, Keohane's contribution to the field has been to create an alternative to the realist paradigm, then this is very odd, since whatever realism is, it is clear that the main focus of the writings of people who identify themselves as realists is on interstate war, and their main quarrel with neoliberal institutionalism concerns the role of international institutions and economic interdependence in preventing it. Thus, the essays in this volume seem to support the view that neoliberal institutionalism is not a paradigm that competes with the realist paradigm but just a change of subject.
One of the unfortunate effects of thinking about the study of international politics as consisting of competing paradigms is that anything that calls one paradigm into question seems automatically to increase the credibility of its competitors. This distracts our attention from the deficiencies that they all have in common. Ironically, one such deficiency has been a failure to think carefully about war itself, and the bargaining that is associated with it. Another has been a failure to incorporate the lessons from the literature on the development of domestic political institutions into debates about the role of international institutions in preventing war. The result has been to leave students of international politics intellectually handicapped in trying to understand the controversies about state failure and cross-border terrorism that have been such an important part of the post–Cold War foreign policy agenda.
In this volume, the only essay that comes close to recognizing these deficiencies is the one by Tickner, which, unfortunately, focuses only on the role of religion in those developments. It is a shame that more attention to these issues was not paid by other contributors. At the same time, the book brings together a set of illuminating essays that nicely expand on themes central to Robert Keohane's scholarly corpus and underscore the importance of his contributions to the study of world politics.
