Neo-Realism and the future of strategy

Abstract

To speak of the ‘future’ of strategy is to reveal a deep tension in the way we commonly think about the subject. On the one hand we are confronted by revolutionary changes in the geo-political landscape. The transformation of Europe, the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, for example, encourage the belief that the Cold War—a term which has been almost synonymous with-strategy for nearly half a century—is now an historical artifact. These events, analyzed so intensively by leaders and commentators, open up significant questions about the future of strategy.

Nuclear Weapons Scholarship as a Case of Self-Censorship in Security Studies

“…As a matter of fact, the future is expected to play a role in the concluding section of policy-relevant scholarship. But it is not any kind of future; it is a bounded set of possible futures derived from patterns that a positivist research program should have identified in the past and that the scholar is expected to extend into the future (Williams 1993;Berenskoetter 2011, 657-60;Waever 2015, 95). 8 The existing presentism in security studies (see Buzan and Little 2000, 30) invokes modalities of the future that, in turn, constitute a third form of self-censorship: "imaginative self-censorship."…”

“…14 13 The bet on the future relying on conventionalization is utopian about technological as well as political change: it assumes that the existing arsenals have been dismantled, are safely monitored, and that a rearming race will be kept under control before the conventionalization of nuclear weapons and before a catastrophic failure of nuclear deterrence. 14 Paradoxically, if the legacy of Kenneth Waltz had to remain front and center of security studies scholarship, that might be an invitation to rethink the democratic responsibility of scholars in line with his too-little-noticed efforts at arguing against the elitist inclination of classical realism writing for the foreign policy elites (Bessner and Guilhot 2015;Williams 2009). Alternatively, reclaiming Robert Gilpin as another founding father of realist thought in the 1970s and 1980s would allow us to reopen the questions of change, predictability, and possible futures (Wolfworth 2011;Kirschner 2015, 157fn3, 160-61, 164, 178).…”