Hegemons rise and fall, yet international cooperation often outlasts them. Even today, in an era of declining US relative power, rising economic nationalism, and tension-filled alliances, many are asking why cooperation can sustain itself. This seemingly contradictory puzzle makes Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony worth revisiting. Published in 1984, the book responded directly to hegemonic stability theory and realist skepticism toward cooperation. Its central question remains essential today. Can international cooperation exist among self-interested states, even without a hegemon to enforce it?
Keohane opens by confronting a key dilemma in international political economy. He asks why would cooperation occur at all in an anarchic world without overarching authority? Hegemonic stability theory argues that a stable liberal economic order requires a dominant power to provide public goods and enforce international rules. Rather than accept hegemonic stability theory’s answer, Keohane applies post-1945 economic coordination to challenge the assumption that only power can produce cooperation. By arguing that hegemony is neither necessary nor sufficient for sustained cooperation, he highlights that international regime’s structure incentives, reduce uncertainty, and provide material advantages that make cooperation beneficial for self-interested states.
Regimes are what let cooperation survive after a hegemon declines. Keohane defines them as principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures that states expect each other to follow, less like formal governments and more like shared habits of behavior. They don’t erase self-interest, and no outside authority enforces them. Instead, they work by making information easier to get, making transactions cheaper, and cheating easier to spot, enough to make coordination pay and defection costly. History bears this out. British dominance in the nineteenth century produced “far less systematic rule-making power” than hegemonic stability theory predicts (33), and when U.S. power eroded in the 1960s, cooperation didn’t collapse with it. In both cases, the expectations states had built up outlasting the power that created them.
This is the foundation of neoliberal institutionalism which is the theory that states are still rational and self-interested, exactly what realists assume, but that alone doesn’t doom them to constant conflict. Keohane draws one more distinction here, between cooperation and harmony. Harmony is when interests already align on their own, with no adjustment needed. Cooperation is what states do when interests conflict but adjusting still pays off, in Keohane’s words, bringing “the action of separate individuals or organizations—which are not in preexistent harmony—be brought into conformity with one another” (51). What makes that rational rather than naive is repetition: states expect to deal with each other again, so cooperation today can be rewarded and defection punished later. Keohane doesn’t oversell this. Regimes still face real limits, including moral hazard, collective action problems, and genuine uncertainty about whether an institution will hold (88).
Keohane’s empirical examples demonstrate that these regimes (e.g., GATT, the IMF) shape behavior. American protectionism shows that regimes function as cognitive devices to guide decision-making and stabilize expectations. For example, voluntary export restraints often replaced quotas even though quotas would have captured more rent for governments, suggesting that established expectations within GATT shaped economic choices beyond just material incentives (99). Created through US leadership, the International Energy Agency provides another example of reciprocal expectations, demonstrating how governments can reduce transaction costs without directly enforcing state behavior. It sustained its function through the qualities found within international regimes rather than through continued US enforcement. Even its “fiasco” in 1979 demonstrates the limits and adaptability of regimes rather than their complete collapse when conflict approaches (240).
Even in what has appeared to become a more realist world today, Keohane’s argument remains relevant. Tariffs, export controls, and sanctions show that states are increasingly willing to pursue unilateral, zero-sum strategies, yet institutions like the WTO and NATO haven’t collapsed the way realists might expect. Keohane’s framework predicts exactly this. Regimes don’t need every member’s full faith to survive. They need defection to stay costlier than coordination, even when trust is thin. The harder question is what happens if that calculation flips, if major powers conclude that institutions no longer produce mutual gains at all. The U.S.-China trade war looks like an early test case. Washington and Beijing have both bypassed WTO dispute mechanisms in favor of unilateral tariffs, betting that the cost of going around the regime is lower than the cost of working through it. Keohane never assumed cooperation was guaranteed to survive. He explained the conditions that make it possible, and today those conditions are being tested in real time.