Back to the Drawing Board: A Critique of Offensive Realism

Abstract

Offensive realism argues that states committed to survive are nevertheless condemned to participate in a relentless struggle for power, and it holds the structure of the international system as the cause of this tragic outcome. This article subjects the logic behind this tragic worldview and the explanatory power of offensive realism to a careful and comprehensive scrutiny. This in-depth analysis of offensive realism amounts to a substantial critique of the theory as it fails to logically generate the brutish world it presupposes and is plagued by significant shortcomings in its explanatory model. These findings suggest that offensive realism cannot provide useful theoretical lenses for explaining and understanding international politics, even when it is assessed on its own terms.

Offensive realism, differentiation theory, and the war in Ukraine

“…Rather than attempting a grand theory comparison between structural realism and world society theory-the relation between the two theories has already been treated with great sophistication by Albert (2016)-these final considerations are exclusively meant to suggest a more elegant solution to the problem offensive realism faces when confronted with the empirical complexity of real-world conflict phenomena (cf. Pashakhanlou 2013Pashakhanlou , 2014. They are based on the diagnosis that the evolution of the Russian political system-both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union-charted a course somewhat different from the standard model of Western modernity underlying world society theory.…”

The ethics of Carr and Wendt: Fairness and peace

“…This article engages with the issue by conducting an in-depth scrutiny of morality in the classical realist works of E.H. Carr 2 and the constructivist publications of Alexander Wendt. 3 This approach is privileged over the alternative method 4 of addressing realism and constructivism as generic schools of thought since there are significant differences between scholars labeled under these broad intellectual traditions (Hopf, 1998; Pashakhanlou, 2013, 2014, 2016). It would therefore be arbitrary to lump them all together under the false presupposition that they represent a unified homogeneous block.…”