1. The Past, Present, and Future of Realism: A Conversation with Stephen M. Walt—February 2024
- Author:
- Stephen M. Walt
- Publication Date:
- 07-2024
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Fletcher Security Review
- Institution:
- The Fletcher School, Tufts University
- Abstract:
- I liked realism from the start because I thought it did a much better job of explaining how states behave than other theories. It is not perfect, and it’s not that other perspectives don’t make their own contributions to our understanding, but I felt that realism had a much better track record in explaining how countries behaved. It also had extraordinary range across time and space: realist ideas could explain a lot about how empires acted, how city-states acted, how nation-states acted. It had explanations for why wars occur, why alliances form, why some states rise and fall. So it had a very wide applicability. And I thought that the main modern rivals to realist theory just weren’t as persuasive. Liberal theories didn’t predict that well. A good liberal would think that democracies would act fundamentally differently than autocracies, but the evidence that they do is limited. And as we talked about before, realism tells you that international law or norms will be of only limited value in controlling what the most powerful states will do.
- Topic:
- International Affairs, Democracy, Realism, and State
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus