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How do foreign actors involved in ‘regime change’ decide which kinds of domestic governance structures to promote in place of the regimes they have deposed? Most of the literature on foreign-imposed regime change assumes that interveners make such decisions based on rational calculations of expected utility. This article, by contrast, contends that interveners are predisposed to promote political arrangements that correspond to their own governance ‘schemas’, or taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of political authority. These patterns are examined in relation to the US-led regime-change invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, the interveners appeared to be guided – and partially blinded – by their own governance schemas. Yet, if schemas have these effects, they should also be visible in cases where interveners held very different assumptions about governance and the ‘state’ than those held by US officials in Afghanistan and Iraq. To probe this possibility, this article also examines an older, non-Western case of intervention – the Mongol invasion and occupation of northern China in the thirteenth century – a case that yields similar results and highlights the need for additional historical research in this field.
