mearsheimer's 5 assumptions of realism

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. 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. By making implicit assumptions about human behavior explicit, offensive realism may become a more powerful theory. Second, our argument makes two contributions to the theory of offensive realism: We ground the theory in human evolution (instead of the international system), and we extend it into new domains (beyond the interaction of states as units of analysis). 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? Animals do not constantly fight. However, a key insight from evolution is that the primacy of self-help, power maximization, and outgroup fear does not necessarily condemn individuals or groups to competition and conflict; rather, these traits can in themselves give rise to cooperation and alliances. Moreover, it argues that statesare obliged to behave this way because doing so favors survival in the international system. 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). That choice, I argue in this article, creates three problems for his theory. 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). 1-49; Robert Gilpin, War and In short, the core elements of Mearsheimer's offensive realism are the five assumptions, states, fear, self-help, relative power maximization, the balance of power and war. | Find, read and cite all the research you . In other species, males cannot coerce females, but the females are choosy about with whom they mate, leading to selection pressures for males to demonstrate or signal their quality as attractive partners. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Offensive realism, more than other major theories of international relations, closely matches what we know about human nature from the evolutionary sciences. In environments where resources are highly contested, outgroup fear can become extreme. Two theories of offensive realism. Second, we introduce key evolutionary concepts that explicate the human behaviors upon which offensive realism depends. 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. However, a study by Wrangham and Glowacki, which explicitly looked at warfare among hunter-gatherers who were surrounded by other hunter-gatherers, found that warfare was just as common in this more natural setting.Reference Wrangham and Glowacki80 Evidence from across the cumulative research of archeologists and anthropologists indicates that violence is a widespread feature of small-scale foraging societies and follows a pattern that is consistent as far back as we can see in the ethnographic and archeological record.81. Thus, the power of sexual selection can lead to the evolution of traits that actually damage survival in order to achieve superiority over other males.Reference Lincoln, Short and Balaban104,Reference Trivers and Campbell105 Reproduction trumps survival in evolution. Will an outsider compete for the current or future resources that the insiders need to survive or expand? Hamilton used genetic models to show that, while individual organisms are egoistic, they should be less so in their behavior toward genetic relatives, especially in parent-offspring and sibling relationships.Reference Hamilton87,Reference Hamilton88 This decrease in egoism is because close relatives share many of the same genesone-half for siblings and parents, one-quarter for aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and one-eighth for cousins. To an observant international relations scholar, the behavior of chimpanzees is remarkably like the behavior of states predicted by the theory of offensive realism. Under these conditions, such behavior will have been favored by natural selection and spread. However, once again, the potential for cultural group selection does not change or challenge our argument. Wilson captures the evolutionary logic succinctly, saying that humans would fight wars when they and their closest relatives stand to gain long-term reproductive success, and he continues, despite appearances to the contrary, warfare may be just one example of the rule that cultural practices are generally adaptive in a Darwinian sense.Reference Wilson73 An evolutionary approach allows the expectation that contemporary humans possess specific behavioral traits that contributed to fitness in the past, including the willingness to fight to retain or gain the resources necessary so that the individual, the family, and the extended family group would continue to survive and reproduce.Reference Lopez74, Unsurprisingly, direct evidence of human behavior from the Pleistocene era is rare, but in addition to archeological finds, we have evidence from recent and contemporary indigenous societies that offer a model for the behavior of our distant ancestors, who lived under similar social and ecological conditions. 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. Mearsheimer thus judged U.S. participation in World War II to have been entirely appropriate, since Nazi Germany and imperial Japan sought to dominate their respective regions. 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. Our ancestors not only lived in a state of anarchy for millions of years, but they also evolved in that state of anarchy and consequently developed cognitive and behavioral adaptations specifically to survive and reproduce effectively under conditions of anarchy. States are much the same. Whereas classical realists such as Hans Morgenthau had traced international conflicts to the natural propensity of political leaders to seek to increase their power, neorealists (or structural realists) such as Waltz located the cause of war in the structure of international relations. Second, even if group selection does occur, it can only increase altruism within groups. 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. Indeed, it is at these vast scales where our evolved dispositions can have their greatest and most dangerous effects. We prefer a more positive picture of human nature, perhaps one that accords with comfortable modern life in developed states. Mearsheimer follows on the premises of Kenneth Waltz's theory by deriving the behavior of states from the "structure" of the international system. The international system is anarchic. In 2007 Mearsheimer coauthored with Stephen M. Walt a best-selling but highly controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007). Hunter gatherers have recurrent tendencies, including hostility toward members of different societies, and for killing to be carried out in relative safetythat is, only when there is a strong asymmetry in power between subgroups, such as in a raid or ambush (the imbalance of power hypothesis). In this article, Dominic Johnson is professor of international relations at the University of Oxford. In sum, evolutionary theory offers realist scholars a natural-scientific behavioral foundation for offensive realism. Historically, evidence has often supported this hypothesis.199,200,201 However, we take the position that, on average, state leaders personal interests have significant and genuine overlap with national security interests, not least of which is the survival and prosperity of the state for themselves and their progeny. Mearsheimer's 5 Assumptions 1) International System is Anarchic 2) Great Powers possess military capability 3) States can't be certain about other state intentions 4) Survival is the primary goal of great powers 5) Great powers are rational actors Mearsheimer's 3 Functions of State Behavior 1) States fear each other 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. The origins of warfare are rooted in the imperative to gain and defend resources necessary for survival and reproduction in dangerous and competitive conditions. Conventional offensive realism cannot explain such events well. At the dawn of the 21st century, an era that will be dominated by science at least as much as philosophy, we have the opportunity to move away from untested assumptions about human nature. As evolutionary economist Robert Frank has explained, Evidence suggests that we come into the world equipped with a nervous system that worries about rank. Cooperation and peace efforts often fail precisely because people have too rosy a view of human nature and thus fail to structure incentives effectively. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (Northwestern University) and has written numerous articles Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Egoism and dominance are important mechanisms for attaining security, but also important is attaining security from members of other groups. 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. Render date: 2023-05-01T12:27:54.717Z A couple of times a month, groups of males would venture stealthily and deliberately into the periphery of their neighbors territory and, if the invaders found males wandering there alone, they brutally beat them to death. Chimpanzees with larger territories have higher body weights, and females in those territories give birth to more offspring. Our argument is that evolution produced a human brain and human behaviors that closely match these implicit behavioral patterns on which Mearsheimers theory of offensive realism depends: Egoism (self-help) captures why we want resources and resist their loss; Dominance (power maximization) explains why we want power to control resources for ourselves and our relatives and why we seek to defend them from or deny them to others; Ingroup/outgroup bias (fear of others) explains why we perceive other human groups as threats and rivals. All anarchy does is remove constraints on pursuing such behavior. Retaliation and collaboration among humans, Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations, Evolutionary biology: Struggling to escape exclusively individual selection, Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioural sciences, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Origins of Cooperation, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power and the Pursuit of Office, Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes, Selected: Why Some People Lead, Why Others Follow, and Why It Matters, Presidential Ambition: Gaining Power at Any Cost, Women and the evolution of world politics, Madam President: Women Blazing the Leadership Trail, Misperception and the causes of war: Theoretical linkages and analytical problems, Aggression and the self: High self-esteem, low self-control, and ego threat, Human Aggression: Theories, Research, and Implications for Social Policy, Victims of Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Collective violence: comparisons between youths and chimpanzees. They can only be regional hegemons. We thank Robert Jervis for bringing this point to our attention. Identification with a specific group provides individuals with meaning and purpose, encouraging them to become part of a community with common interests, values, and goals.Reference Hewstone, Rubin and Willis122,Reference Fiske123,Reference Sidanius and Pratto124 One also knows what one is notthe outgroup, which is stereotyped and homogenized as the Other. Among the many different possible ingroup categories, the most common and significant include family, friends, age, sex, class, ethnicity, politics, religion, and nationality. 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. Who wants power? An exceptional study of realism, and in some respects the fountainhead of offensive realism is Ashley Joachim Tellis, Gat 2006 and Azar Gat, So why do people fight? The result was that the theory lacked, and still lacks, a scientifically describable ultimate cause. Mearsheimer's theory is built on five bedrock assumptions. Neorealism (international relations) - Wikipedia Dominance behavior occurs in thousands of taxonomic groups ranging from fish and reptiles to birds and mammals. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Evolutionary theory offers a powerful explanation for the trait of egoism (by which we mean the nonpejorative definition of self-regarding, prompted by self-interest).86 Given competition for limited resources and threats from predators and the environment, an individual organism is primed to seek its own survival andthe Darwinian bottom linereproductive success. hasContentIssue false, Human evolution under anarchy: predation, resource competition, and intergroup conflict, The evolution of adaptive behavioral strategies: Egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias, Evolution and offensive realism: New insights, Criticisms and extensions of an evolutionary approach. If women led them, or were better represented in legislative or executive branches of government, a logical prediction of our theory is that egoistic, dominant, and groupish tendenciesbeing primarily male traitswould be less likely to influence state behavior. Some of these date from the split with our last nonhuman primate ancestor at the beginning of the Pliocene, around 5 million years ago. In the right contexts, helping others can help oneself. However, another important source of variation is individual differencesthat is, specific people exhibit these traits to greater or lesser degrees. We understand that this assertion may be a point of contention and look forward to engaging with our critics on this matter. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Indeed, the competition for mates is subject to a special type of evolutionary selection processsexual selection, as opposed to standard natural selection. John Mearsheimer's Theory and its Major Assumptions|Realism Mearsheimers other works included Conventional Deterrence (1983), Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988), Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (2011), The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018), and scores of articles published in academic journals. Given the prominence of the concept in present-day international relations theory, it is striking that anarchy only took hold as a central feature of scholarship in recent decades, since the publication of Kenneth Waltzs Theory of International Politics in 1979. Like most international relations scholars of his generation, Mearsheimer was deeply influenced by Kenneth Waltz, the founder of the school of international relations known as neorealism. Finally, evolution may make significant contributions to other theories of international relations. 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 . Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. In short, our theory is one of behavioral ecologyhuman and animal behaviors are not constants, but are contingent strategies that become engaged or elevated in order to best seek payoffs depending on the particular circumstance or environment. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/59922#eid5780558, http://edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-of-group-selection. Theories purporting to explain human behavior make explicit or implicit assumptions about preferences and motivations, and mainstream theories in international politics are no exception. However, our contention is that significant aspects of political behavior could be given a stronger foundation if we acknowledge the powerful and basic biological principles that are chronically ignored in the political science literature, as well as the conditions under which they become exacerbated or suppressed. The strength of dominance hierarchies in humans is debated and varies empirically, but such hierarchies are always evident in some form or other. Theorists have had to explain how cooperation could occur in the face of significant individual self-interest, the difficulties of collective-action, and the free-rider problem.Reference Boyd175,Reference Olson176,Reference Ostrom177 Special conditions are needed for cooperation to emerge and remain stable among unrelated individuals.178,Reference Sigmund179 Typically, those special conditions are ones that make helping advantageous to the genes responsible for the behavior. Fourth, we have argued that evolutionary insights closely match offensive realism among existing theories of international relations. When the stakes are high enough, individuals as well as states all too easily revert to egoism, dominance, and fear. How does the evolutionary perspective outlined above relate to offensive realism? Drawing on both disciplines, he is interested in how new research on evolution, biology, and human nature challenges theories of international relations, conflict, and cooperation. Even optimists acknowledge that remarkable mechanisms and institutions are required to generate and sustain cooperation, and the identification and implementation of these conditions occupies many of our colleagues.180,Reference Milner181,182 183 The European Union, to give one flagship example, is often put forward as a vision of the future, demonstrating that democratic states are willing to subordinate self-interest for a greater good, and that war is becoming obsolete. 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. The motivation for such conquests does not, of course, involve conscious planning to attain larger territories or more offspring. realism's 5 assumptions about the international system o 1)the international system is anarchic (no higher ruling body) o 2) states inherently possess some offensive military capability which gives them the wherewithal to hurt and possibly to destroy each other o 3) states can never be certain about the intentions of other states 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. We do not assume that humans and our primate cousins simply inherited these traits wholesale from a common ancestor. Individuals fight when benefits are expected to exceed costs (on average), and not otherwise. In international politics, the bigger problem may be aspiring hegemonsstates that do not need to cooperate to obtain what they want. Moreover, and lastly, cultural differences have themselves represented an additional cause and consequence of conflict. However, even fellow realists have found problems and inconsistencies with Waltz's structural realism. If our hypothesis is correct, then evolutionary theory offers the following: (1) a novel ultimate cause of offensive realist behavior; (2) an extension of offensive realism to any domain in which humans compete for power; and (3) an explanation for why individual leaders themselves, and not just states, seek power. Indeed, given our approach, we submit that it is incumbent upon offensive realists to demonstrate why the anarchy of the international political system is necessary as a basis for their theory. Footnote 16 In summary, Mearsheimer's realism is influenced profoundly by this core theoretical commitment to structural realism and its modification to include the rational actor assumption. States do not cooperate, except during temporary alliances, but constantly seek to diminish their competitors power and to enhance their own. However, what is striking is the prevalence and potency of dominance in social organization, despite variations in the specifics. 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. Let us begin, therefore, by situating offensive realism in the realist paradigm moregenerally. As formulated by Mearsheimer, the theory of offensive realism is a type of neorealism because the principal causes of state behavior are rooted in the anarchic international system. Rathbun, Brian C. The cognitive mechanisms underpinning the three traits were established in an environment very different from the one in which humans now live, but they persist because our brains, biochemistry and nervous systems, which evolved over many millions of years, have remained the same despite the rapid sociological and technological advances of the last few centuries. First, the preferences of individual citizens are, at least to a degree, represented in those elected toor tolerated inoffice, and those preferences may also be seen in the goals of the state. Mearsheimer based his theory on five core assumptions: (1) the international system is anarchic (there is no authority that exists above the states to arbitrate their conflicts), (2) all states have some military capability (however limited), (3) states can never fully ascertain the intentions of other states, (4) states value survival above all else, and (5) states are rational actors that seek to promote their own interests. Mearsheimer's main innovation is his theory of 'offensive realism' that seeks to re-formulate Kenneth Waltz's structural realist theory to explain from a structural point of departure the sheer . An article adapted from the book had previously been published by Foreign Affairs. Until recently, international relations theorists rarely used insights from the life sciences to inform their understanding of human behavior. Given the considerable cooperation evident in the natural world, one might think that evolution provides a foundation for cooperative behavior rather than selfish, power-maximizing behavior. I, The genetical evolution of social behavior. 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