He expands on Waltz's idea of structure causing behaviour . The international order, in other words, is determined by the balance of power between states. Mearsheimer, taking his geography argument further, asserts that stopping the power of w ater is precisely why no state can be a global hegemon. These traits help to explain why humans (including political leaders) will behave, in the proper circumstances, as offensive realists expect them to behave. Indeed, Wrangham and Glowacki find evidence that after warriors killed members of a neighboring society, the killers group benefited as a whole via territorial expansion83precisely as has been shown for intergroup killings by chimpanzees. An organized social structure can help promote the harvesting of resources, coordinate group activity, and reduce within-group conflict. As with all things in nature, dominance hierarchies vary considerably. Other recent work has been an International Security paper, with Monica Toft, Grounds for War: The Evolution of Territorial Conflict, which explores the behavioral origins of fighting over land. Will an outsider compete for the current or future resources that the insiders need to survive or expand? In general, humans cooperate where we can (e.g., within groups or within alliances deriving mutual benefit), but the anarchy of international relations is a hostile environment that, like the one in which humans evolved, tends to trigger our egoism, dominance, and group bias. Mearsheimers offensive realism argues that states gain power to ensure security. The group can accept organization with some centralization of power (dominance hierarchies), or it can engage in perpetual conflict (scramble competition), which incurs costs in terms of time, energy, and injuries, as well as depriving the group of many benefits of a communal existence, such as more efficient resource harvesting.119 Among social mammals, and primates in particular, dominance hierarchies have emerged as the primary form of social organization. We recognize that humans are influenced by culture, norms, rational calculation, and moral principles. Rather, we suggest it is an example of what biologists call evolutionary convergencesimilar traits arising in different settings because they are good solutions to a common problem. Note that we do not intend to make the full case forthe role of evolution in human behavior. The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. Part of the reason for its intuitive and explanatory success is, we suggest, its close match with human behavior. This match, in turn, should be no surprise because human behavior evolved under conditions of anarchy, which pervaded throughout our evolution as well as in international politics today. In environments where resources are highly contested, outgroup fear can become extreme. Where these conditions are tempered, such as in the modern peaceful democracies of Western Europe, these cognitive and physiological mechanisms are likely to be more subdued. Mearsheimer does use his theory to predict the future of great power Mearsheimer's theory operates on five core assumptions. Aggression is not a cultural accident, but an evolutionary adaptation for acquiring and securing resourcesjust as it is for other species. The strategic allocation of resources to others often advances ones own Darwinian fitness. Looking at the environment in which our own species evolved, we find significant empirical evidence for, and a Darwinian logic favoring, intergroup aggression. View all Google Scholar citations Major realist theories and their predictions,154 plus predictions from human evolution. Our theory is also unlimited in domain, explaining behavior wherever there are human actors and weak external constraints on their actions, from ancestral human groups, ethnic conflict, and civil wars to domestic politics, free markets, and international relations. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Pomeroy, Caleb The anarchic state of the international system means that states cannot be certain of other states' intentions and their security, thus prompting them to . 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. However, unlike Waltz, who fears that too much power for a state will lead other states to seek to achieve a balance of power and thus actually threaten the states security (the genesis of defensive realism),30 Mearsheimer argues that the international system requires that states maximize their offensive power to be secure and keep rivals from gaining power at their expense.31 In fact, this systemic incentive is so powerful that states would become the most powerful of all if they could: A states ultimate goal is to be the hegemon in the system.32 Only by being the hegemon can the state be absolutely sure of its security. First, neorealism does not rely on noumenal ultimate causation, and, second, it explains and predicts variations in the likelihood of war in international politicsparticularly among great powers. Egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup distinctions have previously been attributed to variables such as culture, economics, or religion.148,149 For example, Karl Marx and his followers identified egoism as a result of capitalism and called for its suppression and the triumph of class consciousness. Of course, humans are not the same as chimpanzees, although we are close relatives and share a common ancestor around 5 million to 6 million years ago. It's located in Utah Valley's Pleasant Grove, which is about 20 minutes North of Downtown Provo. 5-57; Eric J.Labs, "Beyond Victory: Offensive Realism and the Expansion of War Aims,"Security Studies,Vol. Cooperation and peace efforts often fail precisely because people have too rosy a view of human nature and thus fail to structure incentives effectively. Clearly, not all individuals or businesses or states act the same way all the time or in all circumstances. The fact that these evolved behaviors are not always beneficial today does nothing to undermine their evolutionary logic or empirical presence. In international politics, the bigger problem may be aspiring hegemonsstates that do not need to cooperate to obtain what they want. The legacies of this long evolutionary history exert powerful influences on our behavior, including our political behavior, even today in large settled societies and in the global arena. Natural selection has led to a variety of contingent, context-dependent adaptations for maximizing survival and reproduction that include cooperation and alliances as well as self-help and aggression. The fact is that evolution explains and predicts both (under the relevant circumstances). Napoleon Chagnons work among the Yanomamo of the Amazon revealed that indigenous groups had a constant need to find new territory as they expanded and split, and they experienced a constant fear of other groups because violent conflict was a recurring strategy used to stake out a livelihood.Reference Chagnon75 The Yanomamo are just one example of a pattern that extends to a wide range of indigenous societies around the world.76,77 Across such societies, around 15 percent of male deaths occurred in warfare, which compares to a figure of around 1 percent for the United States and Europe in the so-called bloody 20th century (and in many of those small-scale indigenous societies, the rate of male deaths from warfare is much higher than the average figure of 15 percent).78,Reference Bowles79, It has been argued that such high levels of conflict among indigenous societies might have been caused by pressure from more developed societies encroaching on their territories and way of life from the outside. Theories purporting to explain human behavior make explicit or implicit assumptions about preferences and motivations, and mainstream theories in international politics are no exception. and We thank Robert Jervis for bringing this point to our attention. Third, exploring how evolution intersects with other theories of international relations would advance the goal of consilience, fusing theoretical and empirical knowledge drawn from both the social and natural sciences. A comparison among alternative realist theories. Mearsheimer argues that anarchy is the fundamental cause of such behavior. } Clearly, when it comes to the many distinctive physiological and behavioral changes humans have undergone, ecology has been as or more important than phylogeny (hence, the field of evolutionary anthropology focuses on hunter-gatherer analogues, not nonhuman primate analogues). Fourth, we have argued that evolutionary insights closely match offensive realism among existing theories of international relations. Neorealism therefore works from realism's five base theoretical assumptions as outlined by offensive neorealist scholar John J. Mearsheimer in "The False Promise of International Institutions". In fact, he was highly critical of the Iraq War (200311) and what he saw as an attempt by the United States to police the world. The second contribution of our theory is that it offers an explanation of the behavior of humans in a wide variety of contexts extending beyond international politics. Mearsheimer outlines five bedrock assumptions on which offensive realism stands: (1) the international system is anarchic; (2) great powers inherently possess some offensive military capability; (3) states can never be certain about the intentions of other states; (4) survival is the primary goal of great powers; and (5) great powers are rational actors.39 From these core assumptions, Mearsheimer argues three general patterns of behavior result: fear, self-help, and power maximization.40 It is these three behaviors that are the focus of our article. However, we argue that offensive realists need not depend on the anarchy of the state system to advance their argument. Two theories of offensive realism. We find that these precise traits are not only evolutionarily adaptive but also empirically common across the animal kingdom, especially in primate and human societies. That natural selection should have drawn out the same three traits as Mearsheimer may seem a remarkable coincidence. Of particular note regarding the impact of dominance on human behavior are the roles of both phylogeny (a species ancestral lineage) and ecology (its adaptations to local conditions). Email: Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2016, For an analysis of offensive realism and defensive realism, see. Sexual selection is typically responsible for the hierarchical nature of group-living animal species, including humans, as males fight for rank and the reproductive benefits in brings. Chimpanzees do at least have some important ecological similarities to humans. In short, you do not need group selection to explain altruism. Third, by acknowledging that the social and natural sciences are both necessary to understand human behavior, we advance consilience. We are positively biased toward our own groups and negatively biased toward other groups. Because states operate with imperfect information in a complicated world, they sometimes make serious mistakes. Competition for resources results in situations where consumption by one individual or group diminishes the amount available for others, or where one individual or group controls the distribution of resources and thus can deny them to others.Reference Meggitt63,Reference Keeley64, In the Pleistocene era, any group facing a shortage of resources (or a need for more, as the group expands) could have adopted one or a combination of three basic strategies. The Yanomamo among whom I lived were constantly worried about attacks from their neighbors and constantly lived in fear of this possibility. Evolution is sometimes argued to operate on groups rather than individuals (group selection). John Mearsheimers contribution to neorealism has also proved significant. Note: The unit of analysis varies among the theories (states for defensive and offensive realism, humans for classical realism and human evolution), but all predictions are for state behavior. In some species, reproductive access is settled by coercion, in which the strongest male defeats rivals to dominate a harem. Hierarchies may be weak or strong, and alpha males may sire nearly all offspring or just more than others. However, an evolutionary perspective raises new doubts about the significance of such evidence. Evolutionary theorists now recognize, following William Hamiltons concept of inclusive fitness, that egoism has complexities. Egoism and dominance arose as strategies that provided solutions to achieving survival and reproduction in this environment. In sum, evolutionary theory offers realist scholars a natural-scientific behavioral foundation for offensive realism. "useRatesEcommerce": false As we have been at pains to explain, much of this variation stems from contextual differences (behavioral ecology)that is, a given individuals behavior can change across circumstances. Evolutionary theory makes three major contributions to the offensive realist theory of international politics: (1) a novel ultimate cause of the primary traits of offensive realist behavior (self-help, power maximization, and fear); (2) an extension of offensive realism to any domain in which human actors compete for power (e.g., civil war, ethnic conflict, or domestic politics); and (3) an explanation for why individual leaders themselves, not just states, behave as they do. The core idea of offensive realism is that a state most reliably ensures its security by maximizing its power. Our evolutionary theory of offensive realism is unlimited in time, explaining behavior from the ancestral environment to the present day, whereas offensive realism is conventionally inapplicable prior to 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia established the European state system. Bradley A. Thayer is professor of political science at the University of Iceland. One reason why an evolutionary explanation of egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias is useful is because alternative explanations for these empirical traits have failed. Mearsheimer outlines five assumptions or premises comprising his theoretical . While biological group selection in humans is possible in theory, there have not been any published empirical examples. He subsequently became Content Manager at PressReader. Offensive realism holds that states are disposed to competition and conflict because they are self-interested, power maximizing, and fearful of other states. We invoke anarchy in all situations in the table because, while our core argument is that evolved dispositions (egoism, dominance, groupishness) give rise to offensive realist behavior today even in the absence of anarchy, these evolved dispositions will be more prominent and influential where regulation is lax. Offensive Realism and Maximizing Power. Structuralism is a method of study that focuses on the interaction of the parts, or units of a system, seeing them as more useful to study than the individual units themselves.27 Waltz uses structuralism to demonstrate how the distribution of power in international politics is critical for understanding whether war is more or less likely.28 By wedding anarchy as an ultimate cause and structuralism as a method of analysis, Waltzs neorealism improves upon Morgenthaus realism in two ways. The brain may be responding exactly as it was designed to do, given informational inputs from the environment. A recurrent criticism of any theory of international relations based on the role of individuals is why we should expect individual behavior to tell us anything about state behavior. I, Classical Realism (3) Emphasis on traits of mankind, Core Assumptions of Neorealism aka Stuctural Realism Waltz:, Core Assumptions of Offensive Realism Mearsheimer -Fear/Self Help W 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. 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.
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