international regime

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

in Stephen Krasner's influential definition, a set of explicit or implicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors' expectations converge in a given issue area of international relations; international regimes are distinct from formal international organisations — they are the normative and procedural frameworks that structure state behaviour in areas like trade, nuclear weapons, environmental protection, human rights, and the law of the sea; regimes enable cooperation by providing information, reducing uncertainty, monitoring compliance, and raising the cost of defection through reputational and material consequences; the regime concept emerged in the 1970s as a way to explain patterns of international cooperation that persisted even as American hegemony declined, challenging hegemonic stability theory's prediction that cooperation would erode with hegemonic decline; debates about regime effectiveness — whether regimes merely codify pre-existing power relationships or genuinely change state behaviour — continue to animate the field of international political economy

Examples

• The nuclear non-proliferation regime has kept the number of nuclear-armed states far below what analysts in the 1960s predicted.
• Scholars debate whether the climate change regime established by the Paris Agreement can effectively constrain the emissions of major polluters.