This book takes up one of the key theoretical challenges in the English School's conceptual
framework namely the nature of the institutions of international society. It theorizes their
nature through an analysis of the relationship of primary and secondary levels of institutional
formation so far largely ignored in English School theorizing and provides case studies to
illuminate the theory. Hitherto the School has largely failed to study secondary institutions
such as international organizations and regimes as autonomous objects of analysis seeing them
as mere materializations of primary institutions. Building on legal and constructivist
arguments about the constitutive character of institutions it demonstrates how primary
institutions frame secondary organizations and regimes but also how secondary institutions
construct agencies with capacities that impinge upon and can change primary institutions. Based
on legal and constructivist ideas it develops a theoretical modelthat sees primary and
secondary institutions as shared understandings enmeshed in observable historical processes of
constitution reproduction and regulation.
