Many Western observers of international relations believe that a major underlying problem remains the creation and management of orderly relations among states. A substantial degree of orderliness in relations is required for regularizing mutually beneficial economic and cultural exchange and for assuring the avoidance of mutually destructive violent conflicts. Defending and incrementally developing an existing order is thus seen to be a prime objective for responsible statecraft. To explain how incomplete international orders endure and change is the focus of a prominent and active subfield of international organization, called regime theory. A regime is a set of more or less mutually acknowledged rules - - including principles, norms and decision-making procedures as well as international agreements. International behavior in conformance with the rules can in some circumstances produce convergent expectations about the future and lead to shared recognitions of national security. This project undertakes methodological extension in two directions, by developing ways to utilize textual sources, and by constructing computational methods for analyzing data bases of rules derived from appropriate texts. First, the texts of formal negotiated agreements -- specifically the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and the treaty on the elimination of intermediate- range and shorter-range missiles (INF Treaty) of 1987 - - are used as source materials for the derivation and explication of rules which, if adhered to, constrain subsequent interactions between the United States and the Soviet Union. These agreements are selected because they contain both detailed quantitative limits and broad restrictive principles, and because they create new forums for joint management of their implementation. Second, the rules are expressed in a language which a computer can understand and are organized into a formal data base, similar to a numerical spreadsheet but containing not numbers but statements of permission and prohibition. Finally, a computational logic language is applied to pose questions to the data base concerning which activities conform and which violate the rule sets. The objective is to develop methods for constructing a data base of rules from textual materials, to demonstrate how international behavior can be related to rule-compliance or rule-violation, and thus to establish conceptual and methodological foundations for follow-on empirical analysis of regime possibilities in the very important area of superpower security relations.
