Robert O. Keohane

Robert O. Keohane (born October 3, 1941, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American political scientist, international-relations scholar, and educator. He is a leading figure within neoliberal institutionalism, an approach to international relations that emphasizes the use of international institutions by states to further their interests through cooperation.

After graduating “with great distinction” (equivalent to summa cum laude) from Shimer College, Mount Carroll, Illinois, in 1961, Keohane studied government at Harvard University, receiving master’s and Ph.D. degrees in 1964 and 1966, respectively. He later taught at Swarthmore College (1965–73), Stanford University (1973–81), Brandeis University (1981–85), Harvard University (1985–96), and Duke University (1996–2005). In 2005 he joined the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University as professor of international affairs; he retired as professor emeritus in 2017. His wife, Nannerl Overholser Keohane, was a distinguished political theorist who served as president of Wellesley College and then Duke University.

Keohane became widely known with the publication of Power and Interdependence (1977), a book he coauthored with the Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye. That work played a key role in establishing international political economy (IPE) as a subdiscipline of international relations. Keohane emphasized interdependence and cooperation in world politics. He was critical of the neorealist approach to international relations and its idea that relations between states are mostly characterized by distrust and competition. The neorealist model casts interstate relations as a zero-sum game, where one’s gain necessarily means another’s loss. Keohane argued that states are generally not apprehensive about each other’s successes and look forward to benefiting from cooperation. Besides security issues, Keohane noted, states pursue mutually beneficial activities such as trade or environmental protection. Keohane was also innovative in considering not only state actors but also transnational actors—for instance, multinational corporations and international trade-union federations. He considered the focus on the state in international relations to be too narrow, particularly in the context of globalization.

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In his best-known work, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (1984), Keohane accepted the neorealist premise that states are rational egoists but argued that the pursuit of self-interest can lead to cooperation. He further disputed the neorealist claim that interstate cooperation can exist only when enforced by a dominant military power, or hegemon. That position does not stand up to the facts, according to Keohane, because international cooperation did not diminish after the decline of U.S. hegemony in the 1970s. The main reason, he argued, was the creation of “international regimes” like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Keohane defined an international regime as a set of implicit or explicit norms, institutions, and decision-making procedures that allow states to adjust their expectations and maintain channels of cooperation. States signed on to those regimes, Keohane argued, because they reduced the risks and costs associated with cooperation and allowed them to preserve the gains obtained through collective bargaining. As in economics, “interaction costs” in international relations are increased by the fact that there is no guarantee that the other party will respect its side of the bargain. Although international regimes do not provide a foolproof guarantee, they lower the transaction cost by facilitating negotiation, increasing the information flow between states, and providing mechanisms for monitoring and enforcing compliance. In the end, Keohane argued, international regimes empower more than they constrain.

Keohane’s contributions were recognized with numerous awards, including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (1989) and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science (2005). He was president of the American Political Science Association (1999–2000) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009 he was named the most influential scholar of the preceding 20 years in the field of international relations by the journal Foreign Policy.