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Kenneth N. Waltz is one of the most prominent scholars of international relations (IR) alive today. He is one of the founders of neorealism, or structural realism, in international relations theory.
Biography
Waltz is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University. He is also past President of the American Political Science Association (1987-1988) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently a member of the faculty of Columbia University.
He wrote the following books:
- Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (1959). This book proposed a three-images view of looking at international relations behavior. The first image was the individual and human nature; the second image the nation-state, and the third image the international system.
- Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience (1967).
- Theory of International Politics (1979). In this book Waltz elaborates many of the core principles of neorealist international relations theory, adopting a structural perspective that sets him apart from earlier (classical) realists like E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, and later giving rise to the "neoclassical realist" movement (Randall Schweller, Jack Snyder, Thomas Christensen, etc.) which tries to incorporate a structural component while emphasizing the state-society relationship that mitigates structural forces. (This book also popularized the term bandwagoning.)
- "Reflections on Theory of International Politics. A Response to My Critics" in: Keohane, Robert: Neorealism and Its Critics (1986).
- The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (1995; co-written by Scott Sagan). Waltz argued for the virtues of a world with more nuclear weapon states because of their power in deterrence. Sagan argued against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. *
- The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics (2003; coeditor and coauthor, with Robert Art).
He won the following awards:
- The Heinz Eulau Award for "Best Article" in the American Political Science Review in 1990 for Nuclear Myths and Political Realities.
- The James Madison Award for "distinguished scholarly contributions to political science" from the American Political Science Association in 1999. *
Neorealism
- ''Main article: neorealism.
Waltz argues that the world exists in a state of perpetual international anarchy. Waltz distinguishes the anarchy of the international environment from the order of the domestic one. In the domestic realm, all actors may appeal to, and be compelled by, a central authority - 'the state' or 'the government' - but in the international realm, no such source of order exists. Hence in Waltz's account, states must behave in a self-help way, acting freely unless or until other actors restrict or limit their ability to do so.
Like most neorealists Waltz accepts that globalization is posing new challenges to states, but he does not believe states are being replaced, because no other non-state actor can equal the capabilities of the state. Waltz has suggested that globalization is a fad of the 1990s and if anything the role of the state has expanded its functions in response to global transformations.
Along with some other theorists, he has argued that the United States has some characteristics of an empire. In 1979 Waltz incorrectly predicted that the Cold War order would continue well into the next century. This wrong prediction, however, does not represent an anomaly in Waltz's theory since it aims to explain continuities rather than change in international system. Waltz's theory, as he explicitly makes clear in "Theory of International Politics", is not a theory of foreign policy and does not attempt to predict or explain specific state actions, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union. Disintegration of the Soviet Union hence is just out of the explanatory range of the theory. The theory explains only general principles of behavior that govern relations between states in an anarchic international system, rather than specific actions. Indeed, Waltz suggests in Theory of International Politics (1979:6) that mainly explanation not prediction is expected from a good theory. For example, although his theory could not predict the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the theory does explain why a bipolar international system should be more stable than a multipolar system.
References
- "Contemporary mainstream approaches: neo-realism and neo-liberalism" by Steven L. Lamy, 2001.
External Links
See also
Classical realists
Neorealists
Year of birth missing | Living people | Political scientists | American politicians | American philosophers
"Kenneth Waltz"