Routledge Handbook of Security Studies

Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Thierry Balzacq, Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Thierry Balzacq

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317620914
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This revised and updated second edition features over twenty new chapters and offers a wide-ranging collection of cutting-edge essays from leading scholars in the field of Security Studies.

The field of Security Studies has undergone significant change during the past 20 years, and is now one of the most dynamic sub-disciplines within International Relations. This second edition has been significantly updated to address contemporary and emerging security threats with chapters on organised crime, migration and security, cyber-security, energy security, the Syrian conflict and resilience, amongst many others. Comprising articles by both established and up-and-coming scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the key contemporary topics of research and debate in the field of Security Studies. The volume is divided into four main parts:

• Part I: Theoretical Approaches to Security

• Part II: Security Challenges

• Part III: Regional (In)Security

• Part IV: Security Governance

This new edition of the Handbook is a benchmark publication with major importance for both current research and the future of the field. It will be essential reading for all scholars and students of Security Studies, War and Conflict Studies, and International Relations.

PART I

Theoretical approaches to security

1

REALISM AND SECURITY STUDIES

William C. Wohlforth^*

It is impossible to understand contemporary Security Studies without a grounding in realism. After all, many of the most influential theories that have ever been advanced about violence and security among human groups fall within this intellectual tradition. And in many countries realism is a standard part of practitioner’s lexicon, informing headline debates on foreign policy. To many analysts, moreover, realism’s focus on power shifts and power politics seems as relevant as ever, as a rising China and a reassertive Russia upend complacency about the stability of the Western-dominated international system. Given the many scholarly criticisms of realism, ongoing debates about its place in Security Studies, and the proliferation in recent years of such realist ‘brands’ as defensive, offensive, and neoclassical realism, gaining this grounding might seem a formidable undertaking. In fact, the controversy and complexity have eased the task.

As this chapter shows, realist thinking is now far more robust and rigorous than ever, making it much more accessible and useful to security scholars. The chapter provides the four key elements that students of international security need to make use of realism: a simple definition of realism that distinguishes it from other approaches; an introduction to the various sub-schools of realist thought, such as neoclassical realism, which help bring order to the daunting diversity of realist scholarship; an outline of some of the most prominent realist theories, which do the actual work of explaining puzzling real-world phenomena, and a sketch of the contemporary realist contribution to Security Studies.

Defining realism

Realism is a school of thought based on three core assumptions about how the world works:¹

1. Groupism. Politics takes place within and between groups. Group solidarity is essential to domestic politics and conflict and cooperation between polities is the essence of international politics. To survive at anything above a subsistence level, people need the cohesion provided by group solidarity, yet that very same in-group cohesion generates the potential for conflict with other groups. Today, the most important human groups are nation-states, and the most important source of in-group cohesion is nationalism. But it is important to stress that realism makes no assumption about the nature of the polity. It is as applicable to relations between ISIS and the Kurds as it is between the United States and China.

2. Egoism. When individuals and groups act politically, they are driven principally by narrow self-interest. Although certain conditions can facilitate altruistic behaviour, egoism is rooted in human nature. When push comes to shove and ultimate trade-offs between collective and self-interest must be confronted, egoism tends to trump altruism. As the classic realist adage has it, ‘Inhumanity is just humanity under pressure.’

3. Power-centrism. Once past the hunter-gatherer stage, human affairs are always marked by great inequalities of power in both senses of that term: social influence or control (some groups and individuals always have an outsized influence on politics) and resources (some groups and individuals are always disproportionately endowed with the material wherewithal to get what they want). Key to politics in any area is the interaction between social and material power, an interaction that unfolds in the shadow of the potential use of material power to coerce.

Realism’s most important single argument builds on these assumptions to illuminate a relationship between political order and security: if human affairs are indeed characterized by groupism, egoism, and power-centrism, then politics is likely to be conflictual unless there is some central authority to enforce order. When no authority exists that can enforce agreements – in a state of ‘anarchy’ – then any actor can resort to force to get what it wants. Even if an actor can be fairly sure that no other will take up arms today, there is no guarantee against the possibility that one might do so tomorrow. Therefore, all tend to arm themselves against this contingency. Disputes that would be easy to settle if actors could rely on some higher authority to enforce an agreement can escalate to war in the absence of such authority. The signature realist argument is therefore that anarchy renders security problematic and potentially conflictual, and is a key underlying cause of war.

This argument is not restricted to international politics. It identifies a fundamental and universal human problem that may apply to individuals as well as city-states, tribes, empires, or nation-states. The point simply is that insecurity is endemic to anarchy. To be secure, people need to overcome anarchy. One way to do this is to strengthen the bonds within a group to provide governance. This is what states do – or what they are supposed to do. If they fail, then life within a state can become just as threatened by insecurity as life among states. The dilemma is that solving the anarchy problem within one group only magnifies it between groups. Much realist thought is thus focused on how the security problem manifests itself in inter-group relations, but its insights are applicable to politics at all levels of analysis.

Realism’s diversity: theoretical schools

Realism today is marked by the coexistence of numerous sub-schools, notably defensive, offensive, and neoclassical realism. These sub-schools are the outgrowth of sharp debates among scholars as well as unceasing efforts to check realist ideas against international political reality.

Classical realism

It all began with classical realism – a term scholars use to describe the whole realist tradition in all its diversity as it unfolded up to the 1970s. For the subsequent development of International Relations (IR) theory, however, one classical realist text stands far above all others: Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations (Morgenthau 1948). This book inaugurated the practice of seeking to translate the realist tradition of scholarship and statecraft into what Morgenthau, in the famous first chapter of his text, called ‘a realist theory of international politics.’²

Morgenthau’s major text did bring realist arguments to bear on a very large number of phenomena: war, peace, cooperation, international law, diplomacy, ethics, international organization, world public opinion, and more, but it simply failed to hold together as a unified theory, at least in the eyes of his critics. Even fellow realists found Morgenthau’s theory beset by ‘open contradictions, ambiguity, and vagueness’ (Tucker 1952: 214). Key concepts such as the ‘national interest’ or ‘the balance of power’ were either undefined or defined in multiple and mutually contradictory ways. Not surprisingly, arguments deployed in different issue areas did not always cohere.

By the 1960s, many scholars of IR had come to see the natural sciences as models for social sciences. For them, a ‘theory’ had to be a coherent set of linked propositions, preferably falsifiable and empirically verified, that explains some phenomenon. In this context, Morgenthau’s more modest and more humanistic understanding of what a theory of international politics can and should be seemed increasingly anachronistic (Williams 2007). And these scholarly criticisms mounted just as the world’s security preoccupations were moving from the great-power contest between the US and the Soviet Union towards issues such as inequality between the wealthy North and the developing South, resource scarcity, and human rights. Morgenthau’s version of realism seemed out of sync with the times. Out of this first post-war ‘crisis’ of realism came a revival of realist thinking that came to be called ‘neorealism.’

Neorealism

As scholarly criticism of realism mounted in the 1960s and 1970s and the interest in the scientific approach to the study of politics grew (especially in the US), Kenneth Waltz sought to revivify realist thinking by translating some core realist ideas into a deductive, top-down theoretical framework first known as ‘structural realism’ but now most commonly called neorealism. Waltz (1959) held that classical realists’ powerful insights into the workings of international politics were weakened by their failure to distinguish clearly between arguments about human nature, the internal attributes of states, and the overall system of states. His Theory of International Politics (1979) brought together and clarified many earlier realist ideas about how the features of the overall system of states affect security affairs. He presented the book as the transformation of classical realist ‘thought’ into a theory on the scientific model, in keeping with the contemporary expectations of the wider discipline of political science.

By restating, in the clearest form yet, realism’s key argument about how the mere existence of groups in anarchy can lead to powerful competitive pressure and war – regardless of what the internal politics of those groups might be like – Waltz presented a theory that purported to answer a few important but highly general questions about international politics: why the modern states-system has persisted in the face of attempts by certain states at dominance; why war among great powers recurred over centuries; and why states often find cooperation hard. In addition, the book forwarded one more specific theory: that great-power war would tend to be more frequent in multipolarity (an international system shaped by the power of three or more major states) than bipolarity (an international system shaped by the power of two major states, or superpowers). Events in the real world seemed to underline the salience of Waltz’s seemingly abstract ideas: right after the publication of the book, the Cold War heated up, reinforcing the sense that bipolarity was indeed a powerful structural force shaping international security.

Yet even in the 1980s, it was clear that neorealism left a great many questions about international security unanswered: why alliances form, why arms races begin and end, why states create international institutions, why the Cold War began, and why the superpower rivalry waxed and waned, and many more. The overwhelming majority of scholars seeking to address those questions found Waltz’s general theory insufficient. Most responded by using Waltz’s work as a foil for developing self-consciously non-realist explanations of specific puzzles or, more ambitiously, for developing alternative theoretical schools, most notably institutionalism (Keohane 1984) and constructivism (Wendt 1999). But some responded by developing their own realist theories based on Waltz’s. For example, in seeking to explain alliance behaviour, Stephen M. Walt (1987) integrated insights from Waltz into a new, related but clearly distinct ‘balance of threat’ theory (discussed below), while Glen Snyder (1997) combined Waltz’s theories with other complementary theories. In explaining cooperation, Joseph Grieco (1988) supplemented Waltz’s theory with propositions from game theory.

Thus, even though Waltz, like Morgenthau, presented his work as a single stand-alone realist ‘theory of international politics’, the natural development of scholarly inquiry led to the development of neorealism as a complex sub-school within realism, encompassing many Waltz-inspired theories. What linked the research of these scholars best captured as ‘neorealist’ was a common bet that Waltz’s reformulation of realism was the best place to start inquiry.

Offensive and defensive realism

The advent of neorealism sparked a major debate that still reverberates among scholars. The debate was well under way before the Berlin Wall fell, but the Cold War’s end further intensified critical scrutiny of Waltz’s ideas. The criticisms added up to a crisis of realism that was easily as consequential as the antirealist storm that had pummelled Morgenthau in the 1960s and 1970s. While the focus at the time was on the theory’s deficiencies – neorealism has never recovered the scholarly influence it attained in the 1980s – in hindsight, it is clear that neorealism had caused scholars to think much harder and more clearly about the underlying forces that drive IR. Realists working with Waltz’s theory discovered that, depending on how they thought about the core assumptions, and what they saw as the most reasonable expectations about real-world conditions, neorealism could lead to very different predictions. Written in a highly abstract manner, Waltz’s neorealism ignored important variations in IR, including geography and technology. Depending on how one conceptualized those factors, the very same neorealist ideas could generate widely disparate implications about the dynamics of inter-state politics. Out of this realization were born two new theoretical sub-schools, each of which built on the basic insights of neorealism: defensive realism and offensive realism.

Building on core ideas presented in Theory of International Politics and, arguably even more importantly, on the pioneering work of Robert Jervis (1986) on cooperation under anarchy, defensive realists reasoned that under very common conditions, the war-causing potential of anarchy is attenuated (Taliaferro 2000/2001). The harder conquest is, the more secure all states can be. Anything that makes conquest hard can reduce the security problem. For example, it is hard to contemplate the conquest of states that have the capacity to strike back with nuclear weapons. Thus, even accepting Waltz’s arguments about how difficult it is to be secure in an anarchic world, under some conditions, states can still be expected to find ways of defending themselves without threatening others, or can otherwise signal their peaceful intentions, resulting in an international system with more built-in potential for peace than many realists previously thought (Glaser 2010). The result was to push analysts to look inside states for the domestic and ideational causes of war and peace.

Offensive realists, by contrast, were more persuaded by the conflict-generating, structural potential of anarchy itself. They reasoned that, with no authority to enforce agreements, states could never be certain that any peace-causing condition today would remain operative in the future. Even if conquest may seem hard today owing to geography or technology there is no guarantee against another state developing some fiendish device for overcoming these barriers. Given this uncertainty, states can rarely be confident of their security and must always view other states’ increases in power with suspicion. As a result, states are often tempted to expand or otherwise strengthen themselves – and/or to weaken others – in order to survive ove...