What Made John Ruggie's World Transformation Theory and Practice Hang Together

Abstract

With the untimely death of our colleague and friend, John G. Ruggie, the world has lost a brilliant international relations scholar and a global public servant who made enduring contributions to world politics. Ruggie was involved in developing some of the major concepts of modern IR: international regimes, constructivism, epistemes, multilateralism, and embedded liberalism. He had a direct influence on our work and the work of countless other students and scholars of international politics. Ruggie's intellectual trajectory was intimately linked to the journal International Organization because some of his most enduring theoretical contributions were published here. More than any other international relations scholar we have ever met, Ruggie combined scholarship about international organization with top-level involvement in international organizations, especially the UN. But he didn't just manage to do both scholarship and public policy at the same time: his public policy work drew directly on his theoretical conceptualization of the world. The successes of his policy efforts were due not only to his well-recognized collegiality and diplomacy, but to his astute application of theory to craft, diffuse, and legitimate new sets of norms. John Ruggie was born in 1944 in Graz, Austria. He grew up in a one-room flat with minimal indoor plumbing. His early exposure to international relations came when his household received food packages as part of the US Marshall Plan. His family emigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1956. As an immigrant from a working-class background, he was steered toward a technical high school to learn a trade, but he later made his way to MacMaster University, and then to Berkeley for a Ph.D. 2 Ruggie thanked three key people in his life for putting him on his career 1. Our title echoes Ruggie's 1998b title, "What Makes the World Hang Together: Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge." We thank Beverly Crawford, Peter M. Haas, Mary Ruggie, and Steven Walt for their insights, and Martha Finnemore for permission to draw on some paragraphs of joint unpublished work (with Sikkink) for a preface to a never completed IO reader on constructivism.