International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   The study of international cooperation has emerged and evolved over the past few decades as a cornerstone of international relations research. Our strategy for reviewing such a large literature is to focus on the rational choice and game theoretic approaches that instigated and have subsequently guided its advance. Without these theoretical efforts, the study of international cooperation could not have made nearly as much progress – and it certainly would not have taken the form it does today. Through this lens, we identify major themes in this literature and highlight key challenges for future research. While we emphasize the contribution of theoretical approaches to the study of international cooperation, our review goes beyond the success of formal models. First, advances in the study of international cooperation have been intertwined with substantive knowledge of international politics. Indeed, a substantial and growing body of work on international cooperation does not directly depend on formal approaches, although we argue that it has been deeply influenced by it. Second, international cooperation theory is a progressive research program that has repeatedly confronted and responded to the limits of its analysis. One of the prime virtues of formal work is that, by making its assumptions clear, it helps researchers to identify its limits and thereby ... log in or subscribe to read full text