Beyond Anarchy: The Importance of Security Institutions

Abstract

How influential are security institutions in establishing patterns of conflict and cooperation within the international system? According to David Lake of the University of California, San Diego, they are "central”—so central that “neither the Cold War nor U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf would have taken the form it did without the particular security institutions that lay at their core and eventually came to be among their most prominent characteristics.”