Neorealism’s Power and Restraint: A Tribute to Waltz on his 100th Birthday

Kenneth Waltz constructed a pure theory of international politics by isolating structural from unit-level causes. Today’s return of great-power politics signals the persistent relevance of Waltz’s notion of patterns and regularities driven by structural-systemic forces. We have entered an unbalanced bipolar world, in which America still exceeds China in every important category of national power but the gap is narrowing. The relative-power trajectories of the two sides now frames the structural dynamics of their relationship, and how others perceive and calculate their strategic competition. No longer occupying a position of “primacy” either globally or in the Asian Pacific region, the United States now tends to exaggerate, not underestimate, the perceived threat from China in the economic and security realms. More broadly, the world is transitioning from hegemonic order to global disharmony and a restored balance of power—what I refer to as a “Dissent” phase of history. In this phase, disruption of global stability comes not only from the emergence of a counter-hegemonic alliance, which begins to voice its dissatisfaction with the status-quo order and underlying social purpose.   It also comes from the hegemon itself, which behaves in ways that undermine its own order—an order that it now sees as not only unprofitable but a drain on its wasting assets through sponging allies and the exorbitant costs of delivering global public goods

Morality and progress:IR narratives on international revisionism and the status quo

Scholars debate the ambitions and policies of today’s ‘rising powers’ and the extent to which they are revising or upholding the international status quo. While elements of the relevant literature provide valuable insight, this article argues that the concepts of revisionism and the status quo within mainstream International Relations (IR) have always constituted deeply rooted, autobiographical narratives of a traditionally Western-dominated discipline. As ‘ordering narratives’ of morality and progress, they constrain and organize debate so that revisionism is typically conceived not merely as disruption, but as disruption from the non-West amidst a fundamentally moral Western order that represents civilizational progress. This often makes them inherently problematic and unreliable descriptors of the actors and behaviours they are designed to explain. After exploring the formations and development of these concepts throughout the IR tradition, the analysis is directed towards narratives around the contemporary ‘rise’ of China. Both scholarly and wider political narratives typically tell the story of revisionist challenges China presents to a US/Western-led status quo, promoting unduly binary divisions between the West and non-West, and tensions and suspicions in the international realm. The aim must be to develop a new language and logic that recognize the contingent, autobiographical nature of ‘revisionist’ and ‘status quo’ actors and behaviours

The coexistence of peace and conflict in South America: toward a new conceptualization of types of peace

South America's predominant democratic regimes and its increasing interdependence on regional trade have not precluded the emergence of militarized crises between Colombia and Venezuela or the revival of boundary claims between Chile and Peru. This way, how can we characterize a zone that, in spite of its flourishing democracy and dense economic ties, remain involved in territorial disputes for whose resolution the use of force has not yet been discarded? This article contends that existing classifications of zones of peace are not adequate to explain this unusual coexistence. Thus, its main purpose is to develop a new analytical category of regional peace for assessing this phenomenon: the hybrid peace. It aims to research the evolution of security systems in South America during the previous century and build a new, threefold classification of peace zones: negative peace zones, hybrid peace zones, and positive peace zones

World Politics in the Age of Entropy

The Ohio State University Mershon Center for International Security StudiesRandall Schweller is professor of political science at The Ohio State University and director of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center.Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web Page, Streaming Video, Event Photo