Strengthening International Regimes

This book is intended to examine the history of radiation protection up to the present from the perspective of regime theory, with a view to elucidating what this case teaches about how a strong regime in a controversial area can form and maintain itself. This is a particularly relevant issue at present when the overall international rules-based order is under threat and scientific authority doubted. There are significant parallels between the international radiation protection regime and efforts to slow climate change, stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, manage the applications of artificial intelligence, control the use of drones, and confront the risks posed by pandemics. While each has its own dynamics, all these issues involve the interaction of scientific discovery and expertise with the societies that generate them. Learning what works and what does not is vital if we are to limit harm and ensure survival of humanity on a shrinking and warming planet.

“Daniel Serwer has written an enormously original and important book that is informed by his unique background in the history of science, environmental policy, and international affairs. The book amply achieves two objectives. First, it tells the fascinating story of the evolution of standards to protect the public, patients, and researchers against the dangers of exposure to ionizing radiation. This was accomplished, over a period of many decades, by an evolving epistemic community of physicists, biologists, and public health authorities, who availed themselves of rich empirical data to estimate risks and set standards, and to hammer out an enduring regime. Second, in the final chapter, Serwer suggests how the experience gained from the example of radiation protection might be applied to the many current challenges we face, including climate change, the artificial intelligence juggernaut, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and future pandemics, to name a few.” (Geoffrey C. Kabat is cancer epidemiologist and author, most recently, of Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks)

“After a career in diplomacy in the widest sense, Daniel Serwer has prepared this broadly conceived historical account of the origins, in the half-century before World War II, of the autonomous panel of experts successfully setting the international standards for permissible exposure to ionizing radiation – an account first developed as his doctoral dissertation fifty years ago.  Now reworking his account taking account of fifty more years in the history of that panel – now with access to its records -- Serwer has made it the foundation and launching pad for framing the form and function of this autonomous panel as potential model for international regulation of our ever-growing list of scientific-technical helps and hazards. Serwer’s tour de force, ever broadening in scope as it moves toward – and then beyond – the present, and drawing on the social-scientific literature while, as historian and as diplomat, insisting on realism about actors’ motives, makes “the Case of Radiation Protection” into a case for strengthening international norms across the board by putting regulation, conceived as reconciliation under conditions of ‘epistemic dominance’, into the hands of ‘epistemic communities’ of experts.” (Paul Forman, Curator for Modern Physics, emeritus, Smithsonian Institution, USA)



"A fascinating tale of how the standards for radiation dosage came about – not through an international convention, or by inter-governmental agreement but by doctors on the job and scientists in different countries debating and critiquing each other’s work. There is a lot to learn from the process as it unfolded." (Roy Gutman, Pulitzer-prize journalist and president, Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs, USA)

"Tour-de-force on ICRP – the book narrates how, “a strong, science-based but value-laden ‘epistemic community’ regulates a controversial area of human endeavor (radiation) on global basis.” By doing so, Daniel optimistically calls on world bodies to learn and mimic similar pathways to solve global problems such as air pollution, toxic chemicals and even climate change".(Dr M. Mahesh Professor of Radiology & Cardiology Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, USA)

Daniel Serwer (Ph.D., Princeton) is Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he was previously Professor and Director of the Conflict Management and American Foreign Policy programs. He has served as a Vice President at the United States Institute of Peace and as a Minister-Counselor at the U.S. State Department.