Cognitivist approaches to the study of international politics stress ideas and knowledge as explanatory variables. Cognitivists are critical of rationalist theories of international politics, whether of neoliberal or realist provenance. The common flaw of these theories, from a cognitivist point of view, is that they treat states' identities and interests as exogenously given, i.e. as non-theorized initial conditions in explanations of international phenomena such as international regimes. Proponents of knowledge-based approaches point out that by blackboxing the processes which produce the self-understandings of particular states (i.e. their identities) as well as the objectives which they pursue in their foreign policy (i.e. what they perceive to be in their interest), a significant source of variation in international behavior and outcomes is ignored and ipso facto trivialized. Cognitivists argue that these processes are shaped by the normative and causal beliefs that decisionmakers hold and that, consequently, changes in belief systems can trigger changes in policy. Hence, rationalist (neoliberal or realist) explanations of international regimes are at best incomplete and need to be supplemented or even supplanted by a mode of analysis which focuses on the way the “distribution of knowledge” (Alfred Schütz) constitutes the identities, and shapes the preferences as well as the perceived options, of state actors (Schaber and Ulbert 1994).