An evolutionary foundation offers a major reinterpretation of the theory of offensive realism and permits its broader application to political behavior across a wide range of actors, domains, and historical eras. The first assumption is that there is anarchy in the international system, which means that there is no hierarchically superior, coercive power that can guarantee limits on the behavior of states (Mearsheimer 2001, 30). Third, we illuminate offensive realisms new explanatory power when wedded to evolution. The fact that human evolution occurred under conditions of anarchy, that we evolved as hunter-gatherers in an ecological setting of predation, resource competition, and intergroup conflict, and that humans have been subject to natural selection for millions of years has profound consequences for understanding human behavior, not least how humans perceive and act toward others. Of course, cooperation and helping behaviors are common in nature, but such behaviors persist only where they help the genes causing that behavior to spread. An article adapted from the book had previously been published by Foreign Affairs. As we have explained, there are several mechanisms by which altruistic or helping behavior can (and have) evolved because of the benefits of helping others that accrue to oneselfnot least, altruistic behavior among kin, reciprocity, and reputation formation. An organized social structure can help promote the harvesting of resources, coordinate group activity, and reduce within-group conflict. Render date: 2023-05-01T12:27:54.717Z Mearsheimers contrasting view, which he called offensive realism, holds that the need for security, and ultimately for survival, makes states aggressive power maximizers. We do not assume that humans and our primate cousins simply inherited these traits wholesale from a common ancestor. Ali, Saleem H. 15, No. Evolutionary theorists now recognize, following William Hamiltons concept of inclusive fitness, that egoism has complexities. As we have stressed, the human traits of egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias are adaptations to the ecological conditions prevalent in human evolution. Sexual selection is typically responsible for the hierarchical nature of group-living animal species, including humans, as males fight for rank and the reproductive benefits in brings. A comparison among alternative realist theories. While biological group selection in humans is possible in theory, there have not been any published empirical examples. 2018. Classical realists (such as Thucydides, E.H. Carr, Arnold Wolfers, and Hans Morgenthau) and offensive realists share the assumption that states seek to maximize power - that states are relentless seekers of power and influence.Specifically, for classical realists "nations expand their political interests abroad when their relative power increases . John J. Mearsheimer, in full John Joseph Mearsheimer, (born December 14, 1947, New York, New York, U.S.), prominent American scholar of international relations best known for his theory of offensive realism. We see several reasons why human behavior is an important predictor of state behavior in the context of this article. This is not to deny that they miscalculate from time to time. Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Stjrnmlafrideild/Department of Political Science, Hskli slands/University of Iceland, Reference Wilson, Boesch, Fruth, Furuichi, Gilby, Hashimoto, Hobaiter, Hohmann, Itoh, Koops, Lloyd, Matsuzawa, Mitani, Mjungu, Morgan, Muller, Mundry, Nakamura, Pruetz, Pusey, Riedel, Sanz, Schel, Simmons, Waller, Watts, White, Wittig, Zuberbuhler and Wrangham, Reference Sidanius, Kurzban, Sears, Huddy and Jervis, Reference Mirazn Lahr, Rivera, Power, Mounier, Copsey, Crivellaro, Edung, Maillo Fernandez, Kiarie, Lawrence, Leakey, Mbua, Miller, Muigai, Mukhongo, Van Baelen, Wood, Schwenninger, Grn, Achyuthan, Wilshaw and Foley, Reference Milinski, Parker, Krebs and Davies, Reference Ellis, Hershberger, Field, Wersinger, Pellis, Hetsroni and Geary, Reference Taylor, Klein, Lewis, Gruenewald, Gurung and Updegraff, Reference Flack, Girvan, de Waal and Krakauer, Reference Tooby, Cosmides and Hgh-Olesen, Reference Mech, Adams, Meier, Burch and Dale, Reference wrangham, Pilbeam, Galdikas, Briggs, Sheeran, Shapiro and Goodall, Reference Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren and Hall, Reference Baumeister, Boden, Geen and Donnerstein, Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees, Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts, Intergroup aggression in chimpanzees and humans, Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists, Darwins Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict, Evolutionary approaches to political psychology, The origin of politics: An evolutionary theory of political behavior, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, The Peace of Illusions: International Relations Theory and American Grand Strategy in the PostCold War Era, Beyond victory: Offensive realism and the expansion of war aims, Realism and Americas rise: A review essay, The false promise of international institutions, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous TribesThe Yanomamo and the Anthropologists, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations, Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya, International relations as a social science. However, he criticized post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy for overestimating the countrys military power and its capacity to project that power at will. The imperative for survival in a hostile environment also requires that an individual organism places its survival, especially in a time of danger or stress, above the survival of others. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Mearsheimer, The University of Chicago - Biography of John J. Mearsheimer. Other recent work has been an International Security paper, with Monica Toft, Grounds for War: The Evolution of Territorial Conflict, which explores the behavioral origins of fighting over land. Although Mearsheimer recognized war as a legitimate instrument of statecraft, he did not believe that it was always justified. Any given individuals Darwinian fitness will be increased if they can successfully seize the resources of others at sufficiently low cost.Reference Buss and Shackelford71 Of course, warfare also may be waged for defensive reasons, such as to defend critical resources from the advances of others.72 E.O. This is what neorealists call a self-help system: Leaders of states are forced to take these steps because nothing else can guarantee their security in the anarchic world of international politics. Under these conditions, such behavior will have been favored by natural selection and spread. Strikingly, therefore, behavioral dispositions that enhanced success in the small-scale intergroup anarchy of humans evolutionary past may have endowed us with behaviors that also enhance success in the anarchy of the international system. Offensive realism holds that states are disposed to competition and conflict because they are self-interested, power maximizing, and fearful of other states. Second, bureaucracies and organizations are designed, run, and led by human beings, whose own dispositions influence how they function. However, dominance hierarchies were in some sense a mechanism by which this anarchy could be suppressedat least within the groupto the benefit of all group members since they share at least some common interests (such as avoiding conflict). As Mearsheimer and others acknowledge, power maximization may not always be a good strategy and, indeed, it has led a number of states into disaster. Will a male from the outgroup present competition for mates, or will his presence threaten the ingroup males position in the extended family or group? More important, however, is that we both evolved in conditions of free-for-all competitionof anarchywithout any Leviathan to administer life-and-death struggles with rival groups, a situation well recognized in the study of international relations among states. Gat, 2006, p. 427; see also Elizabeth Knowles, ed.. See, for example, the recent articles and responses here: Steven Pinker, The false allure of group selection. In either case, it is females rather than males that are the limiting factor in sexual competition, making male competition for available females intense. These strategies are not unique to humans and, in fact, characterize a much broader trend in behavior among mammals as a wholeespecially primatesas well as many other major vertebrate groups, including birds, fish, and reptiles. Males of most mammal species are particularly competitive with each other over females. However, we need to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. First, offensive realism fails to explain why costly wars sometimes occur against the interests of the states that initiate them. Chimpanzees do at least have some important ecological similarities to humans. His most recent book, with Brian Mazanec, is Deterring Cyber Warfare: Bolstering StrategicStability in Cyberspace (Palgrave, 2014). By making implicit assumptions about human behavior explicit, offensive realism may become a more powerful theory. Anarchy is, ironically, the ordering principle of the global state system and the starting point for most major theories of international politics, such as neoliberalism and neorealism.42,Reference Keohane43,Reference Jervis44,Reference Nye45 Other theoretical approaches, such as constructivism, also acknowledge the impact of anarchy, even if only to consider why anarchy occurs and how it can be circumvented.Reference Wendt46,Reference Onuf47 Indeed, the anarchy concept is so profound that it defines and divides the discipline of political science into international politics (politics under conditions of anarchy) and domestic politics (politics under conditions of hierarchy, or government). In this article, we ask whether the three core assumptions about behavior in offensive realismself-help, power maximization, and outgroup fearhave any basis in scientific knowledge about human behavioral evolution. Neorealism therefore works from realism's five base theoretical assumptions as outlined by offensive neorealist scholar John J. Mearsheimer in "The False Promise of International Institutions". A comparison among alternative realist theories. Depending on the time of year, visitors can enjoy a Mythological Fair in the summer (MYTHOS), a Haunted Festival & Adventure in the fall (LORE) and a Magical Christmas/Winter . Structuralism is a method of study that focuses on the interaction of the parts, or units of a system, seeing them as more useful to study than the individual units themselves.27 Waltz uses structuralism to demonstrate how the distribution of power in international politics is critical for understanding whether war is more or less likely.28 By wedding anarchy as an ultimate cause and structuralism as a method of analysis, Waltzs neorealism improves upon Morgenthaus realism in two ways. As an alpha male provides stability to the group, so too a hegemon in international politics, as many scholars recognize, may provide stability for lesser states both in the realm of international security and for international political economy. In other words, since imbalances of power offer systematic opportunities for low-cost aggression over time, we should expect human groups to have developed a disposition to act aggressively against others when the opportunity arises, because opportunistic aggression is a strategy that pays off on the average. Mearsheimer and Walt in particular make cases for "restraint" and "offshore balancing," meaning a reservation of the use of force to the most serious threats to US power, coupled with a policy to prevent China's assumption of regional hegemony in Asia (Mearsheimer and Walt 2016). On the contrary, it is famously hard to initiate and maintain from both a theoretical and empirical perspective, which is why this topic continues to fill huge volumes of scholarly literature in economics and political science.208,209 As we have emphasized, cooperation is easy to explain where it brings clear mutual benefits to the self-interest of those involved, such as trade or military alliances (in which case offensive realism is as good an explanation of cooperation as any other theory). or Kenneth Waltz's structural realism. Who wants power? Chimpanzees, for example, will attack others when they have a numerical advantage, but they will retreat if they are outnumbered.Reference Wilson, Britton and Franks162 This behavior makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective, because a decision-making mechanism that takes account of the probability of winning will spread at the expense of a decision-making mechanism that does not. Clearly, not all individuals or businesses or states act the same way all the time or in all circumstances. Again, the political world mirrors nature: Not everyone can be the alpha male. Wranghams and Glowackis work has also established empirical support for the evolutionary logic in the patterns of intergroup conflict. Sexual selection has led to costly biological adaptations, such as fighting, the growth of heavy weapons (e.g., antlers), risky courtship displays, or adornments that signal genetic quality (e.g., gigantic tails). Humans evolved in a state of nature where competition for resources and dangers from other humans and the environment were great. By 2009, after 18 such killings, the rival group had been all but destroyed. John Mearsheimer's Theory and its Major Assumptions|Realism #realpolitik International Relations & Politics 13.4K subscribers Subscribe 153 2.4K views 6 months ago Talk given on December. We recognize that a challenge to the theory of offensive realism is the empirical mix of cooperation and conflict in the real world. Offensive realists and other theorists of international relations may see more or less of each. and What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.. First, group selection is a controversial hypothesis, which has been rejected by many prominent evolutionary biologists.186 While selection at the level of groups is possible in principle, it requires special conditions to overcome what are generally agreed to be the much more powerful forces of competition and selection acting on individuals, and these forces are always in play whether groups are in competition with each other or not. Individuals bide their time, form coalitions and alliances, and cooperate with others, but they also seize power where the opportunity arises. Others are even older, such as the limbic system, hormones, and sexual dimorphism, which are shared by countless species extending across all mammals and beyond. Conventional offensive realism cannot explain such events well. Second, the group might seek an alternative for the resource, perhaps through technological innovation or by substitution. Where a states own security is threatened or the state becomes vulnerable to exploitation, alliances offer one means of increasing or preserving power. Between groups, group selection would do the opposite, maintaining or even exacerbating conflict.187 Because the premise is that selection operates at the level of groups, altruistic traits can only spread if altruism helps spread the genes responsible for it at the expense of other genes, and that must occur via intergroup competition or conflict. While relations within groups might be characterized by coordination and cooperation (although internal conflict was important too), relations between groups were characterized by competition and conflict (although external cooperation and trade was also possible). As such, an evolutionary account does not necessarily expect animals, humans, or states to act as offensive realists all the time and in all situations. Our theory is also unlimited in domain, explaining behavior wherever there are human actors and weak external constraints on their actions, from ancestral human groups, ethnic conflict, and civil wars to domestic politics, free markets, and international relations. Rather, as Mearsheimer points out, states do best if they expand only when the opportunity for gains presents itselfthey try to figure out when to raise and when to fold.163 Evolution has been doing this for a long time. Wherever actors are left to compete with each other by relying on their own devices (whether in the human evolutionary past or today), we predict that actors within those systems will exhibit similar behavior, not least self-help behavior to maximize power. Two theories of offensive realism. Waltzs core concept in Theory of International Politics is the anarchy that reigns in world politics. When the stakes are high and ones livelihood or survival is threatened, the traits of egoism, dominance, and fear of outgroups come to the forea conclusion we can draw from any number of conflicts in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, India, and elsewhere. Conflict may seem costly to all parties involved, winners and losers alike, but what matters for natural selection is whether fighting, despite its costs, can bring net benefits to Darwinian fitness. Also like Waltz, Mearsheimer argues that bipolarity (where two states have the majority of power and international influence) is more stable than multipolarity for three reasons: First, bipolarity provides fewer opportunities for war between the superpowers; second, there will tend to be smaller imbalances of power between the superpowers; and, third, there is less potential for great power miscalculation.29. First, neorealism does not rely on noumenal ultimate causation, and, second, it explains and predicts variations in the likelihood of war in international politicsparticularly among great powers. Likewise, many other religious and utopian theorists attribute egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias to special, or at least changeable, circumstances. I, Classical Realism (3) Emphasis on traits of mankind, Core Assumptions of Neorealism aka Stuctural Realism Waltz:, Core Assumptions of Offensive Realism Mearsheimer -Fear/Self Help W Of particular note regarding the impact of dominance on human behavior are the roles of both phylogeny (a species ancestral lineage) and ecology (its adaptations to local conditions). Our approach also suggests that if offensive realism is a product of human nature, rather than merely a consequence of international anarchy, it can be broadened to explain human conflict at many levels, from tribal warfare, ethnic conflict, and civil wars to domestic politics, commercial competition, and international relations. [2] The five bed-rock assumptions of Mearsheimer's theory of offensive realism are: The fifth assumption is that states are rational actors, which is to say they are capable of coming up with sound strategies that maximize their prospects for survival. First, as with other realist theories, Mearsheimer assumes that the . The abundance of intergroup threats, which cause the fear and uncertainty Mearsheimer identifies, are deeply rooted in human evolution under conditions of anarchy over millions of years, and not just in the anarchy of the modern state system in recent history. Mearsheimer's theory is built on five bedrock assumptions. The particular socio-ecological setting in which humans evolved meant that egoism, dominance, and groupishness were important behavioral adaptations, irrespective of the traits found in related species. This foundation permits us to reach realist conclusions about international politics, such as the importance of power in interstate relations, without having to believe in Morgenthaus animus dominandi. This is because a single male can reproduce with multiple females, whereas females can usually only reproduce and rear the offspring of one male at a time, with a long delay before becoming reproductively available again. Scholars often argue over whether historically humans experienced a Hobbesian state of nature, butwhatever the outcome of that debateit is certainly a much closer approximation to the prehistoric environment in which human brains and behavior evolved.48,Reference Buss49,Reference Mirazn Lahr, Rivera, Power, Mounier, Copsey, Crivellaro, Edung, Maillo Fernandez, Kiarie, Lawrence, Leakey, Mbua, Miller, Muigai, Mukhongo, Van Baelen, Wood, Schwenninger, Grn, Achyuthan, Wilshaw and Foley50 This legacy heavily influences our decision-making and behavior today, evenperhaps especiallyin the anarchy of international politics.
Maine State Ferry Schedule, Examples Of Demonstrating Nhs Trust Values, Clearfield County Missing Persons, Sims 4 Cc Folder Simfileshare, Articles M