or Kenneth Waltz's structural realism. When the stakes are high, such as in 1914, 1939, 1941, or 1962, or today in the Middle East, Ukraine, or the East and South China Seas, offensive realism does not seem so foreign. Likewise, many other religious and utopian theorists attribute egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias to special, or at least changeable, circumstances. This perspective does not deny the importance of institutions, norms, and governance in international politics. We now explore the adaptive logic of these behaviors in turn. 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. Mearsheimer follows on the premises of Kenneth Waltz's theory by deriving the behavior of states from the "structure" of the international system. Our argument may be useful for three reasons. Third, by acknowledging that the social and natural sciences are both necessary to understand human behavior, we advance consilience. Despite realisms long history as a theory of international politics and its widespread use by scholars and policymakers such as E.H. Carr, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and Hans Morgenthau, the traditional realist argument rests on weak foundations. The fundamental differences and similarities between our theory of offensive realism and Mearsheimers arecaptured in Table4. For example, among wolves, lions, and chimpanzees, when members of rival groups are found alone, they are extremely vulnerable and risk being killed.140,141,142 We discussed intergroup killing in chimpanzees earlier, but the pattern is notable among social carnivores, too: Studies of undisturbed wolf populations in Alaska have found that 39 to 65 percent of adult deaths were due to intergroup killing.Reference Mech, Adams, Meier, Burch and Dale143, Of course, the ability to assess threats is much more complex in humans than it is in other animals, and human intelligence gives us a greater repertoire of behavior. Behavior varies considerably, just as standard offensive realism predicts for states, and countervailing forces would sometimes mitigate power-maximization strategiesalthough the very need for and difficulties of those countervailing forces help to demonstrate the fact that offensive realist behavior remains an underlying problem. Table2 illustrates the range of domains to which an evolutionary theory of offensive realism applies. Table2. They have enjoyed an absence of competition from gorillas (bonobos only live south of the Congo River, while gorillas only live on the north side of the river), high-quality foliage for food, and dense forest, which reduced vulnerability to ambush and thus, it is thought, the utility of aggression in males.168,169 Accordingly, bonobos may not be a good model for understanding human behavior, for reasons of both phylogenetic history and shared ecology. George C. Williams famously made this point in response to so called nave group selectionists of the time, and his insight has continued to be reiterated to biology students ever since.Reference Williams189. States do not cooperate, except during temporary alliances, but constantly seek to diminish their competitors power and to enhance their own. A dominance hierarchy is created competitively, often violently, and is maintained forcefully, but it can serve to prevent or reduce conflict within a group because it establishes a pecking order that is generally respected. 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. As with all things in nature, dominance hierarchies vary considerably. 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. Note that we did not pick the traits of egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias out of a hat. Neorealism (international relations) - Wikipedia Who wants power? However, we need to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. So, while the natural sciences recognize the remarkable sociality and mutual dependence exhibited by the human species, these sciences are also unified in recognizing the selective advantages of self-interest and power. Indeed, cultural selection has often reinforced, not reduced, these very behaviors over human history. Bradley A. Thayer is professor of political science at the University of Iceland. The genes of egoistic individuals survive and spread at the expense of those that fail to effectively put their own interests first. Neorealism points to international anarchy, a phenomenon we can evaluate, as the ultimate cause of state behavior. He uses and adapts on Waltz's theory to paint a much more pessimistic and altogether darker picture of International relations theory. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. In human history and prehistory, other human groups were commonly the most dangerous threat in the environment, and the ingroup/outgroup bias is likely to have helped the ingroup remain cohesive, avoid and be wary of outgroups, solve the collective action problem in emergencies, and kill outsiders.136,137,Reference Tooby, Cosmides and Hgh-Olesen138, Second, the ingroup/outgroup bias offers a rapid heuristic to weigh the various threats when encountering other humans. } This is not to deny that they miscalculate from time to time. This insight has important implications for international politics because it suggests that we can potentially createat least in principleenvironments that take account of our human nature so we can turn them to our advantage, such as designing institutions that elicit cooperative rather than conflictual tendencies.Reference Keohane164,Reference Stein165. To summarize, a species that lives communally could have two broad forms of social organization. Mearsheimer and Fear | SpringerLink In addition to fighting over resources, we can now fight over ideology as well. The role of war in the evolution of political systems and the functional priority of defense,, For an excellent review of the logic for, and evidence of, adaptations for war, see, Inclusive fitness has recently been the subject of a heated debate in the biological literature; see M. A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson, The evolution of eusociality,, There is copious evidence from historical and contemporary times that such nepotism is a significant influence in politics. Chimpanzees do at least have some important ecological similarities to humans. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. However, the European project was set up precisely to respond to centuries of European powers competing and fighting for power at great cost. Older versions of evolutionary theory sometimes presented strategies and behaviors as fixed or hard wired. Modern biology stresses the contingent, context-dependent nature of behavioral adaptations, which generates finer predictions for when we should expect to see different types of behavior.Reference Davies, Krebs and West155 This is an important point to which we will return. These types of adaptations not only consume precious time and energy but can also decrease survival in other, nonreproductive domains of life (for example, the plumage of male peacocks limits their ability to fly). The key finding is that humans quickly adopt an us (ingroup) versus them (outgroup) worldview. With regard to phylogeny, most primates and all the great apes (the group to which humans belong) have strong social dominance hierarchies, and humans are no exceptiondominance hierarchies have been extensively documented among humans in a wide variety of settings and eras.Reference Wason96,Reference Mazur and Booth97,98 With regard to ecology, dominance hierarchies are a common form of social organization in the kind of ecological settings in which humans evolved (social groups with competing interests, variation in power, and finite resources). On the contrary, it provides or adds to the reasons why we demand and need them, and indeed why they are so hard to establish and maintain. Mearsheimer argues that anarchy is the fundamental cause of such behavior. In the right contexts, helping others can help oneself. Although it is not our intention to resolve offensive realisms theoretical lacunae, an evolutionary account can help to explain them. An organized social structure can help promote the harvesting of resources, coordinate group activity, and reduce within-group conflict. 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). Human evolution explains why people seek control over resources, why some of us (particularly males) will seek to dominate others in order to achieve and maintain a privileged position in a dominance hierarchy, and why we are suspicious and wary of other groups.150 Since the leaders of states are human, they too will be influencedperhaps especially influencedby this evolutionary legacy as they react to the actions of other states and decide how to respond.151,Reference McDermott152,Reference McDermott153. On the contrary, it is famously hard to initiate and maintain from both a theoretical and empirical perspective, which is why this topic continues to fill huge volumes of scholarly literature in economics and political science.208,209 As we have emphasized, cooperation is easy to explain where it brings clear mutual benefits to the self-interest of those involved, such as trade or military alliances (in which case offensive realism is as good an explanation of cooperation as any other theory). First, as with other realist theories, Mearsheimer assumes that the . Starting with biology, or with human evolutionary history, has never been typical in international relations scholarship, but this approach is now less exotic than it once seemed as innovators in a range of social sciences, including economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, pursue this line of inquiry.Reference Fowler and Schreiber54,55,56,57 International relations stands to gain from similar interdisciplinary insights. The strength of dominance hierarchies in humans is debated and varies empirically, but such hierarchies are always evident in some form or other. Genes obviously do not want or try to spread, but the machinery of natural selection means that self-serving alleles will generally increase in relative frequency in the population over time, at the expense of alleles that are neutral or self-sacrificing for no return benefit. In short, on the basis of the family tree, there is little reason to assume that humans should be more or less like bonobos or chimpanzees. Even where dominance hierarchies are actively suppressed, such as in more egalitarian small-scale societies, suppression itself is evidence of the competition for status that simmers beneath the surface.Reference Boehm99 In historical and contemporary societies, competition for power is all too obvious, and the quest for status, dominance, and leadership is ancient and ever present.Reference Mazur100,101,Reference Ludwig102,Reference King, Johnson and Van Vugt103. John Mearsheimers contribution to neorealism has also proved significant. Mearsheimer: International institutions Flashcards | Quizlet However, another important source of variation is individual differencesthat is, specific people exhibit these traits to greater or lesser degrees. Where extensive international cooperation does occur, it is often only by virtue of a hegemon willing to sustain it, and cooperation quickly breaks down if core interests and security are put at risk. In 1982 he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he was appointed the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science in 1996. Evolutionary theory also allows realist scholars to explain the intellectual foundations of offensive realism: Why individuals and state decision-makers are egoistic and strive to dominate others when circumstances permit, and why they make strong ingroup/outgroup distinctions. Heis the author of Darwin and International Relations: On the EvolutionaryOrigins of War and Ethnic Conflict (University Press of Kentucky, 2004). 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. It's located in Utah Valley's Pleasant Grove, which is about 20 minutes North of Downtown Provo. Total loading time: 0 The central issue raised by our theory is what causes states to behave as offensive realists predict. The Stratford scenes play out before a large, A-shaped wooden structure that represents Shakespeare's childhood home. This strategy was clearly not an option for critical resources, such as food and water. Fourth, group decision-making may actually amplify the influence of human dispositions; it is groups of men that are especially prone to behaviors associated with dominance, aggression, and coalitionary psychology.Reference Baumeister, Boden, Geen and Donnerstein203,Reference Janis204,205,206,Reference Wrangham and Wilson207. Second, even if group selection does occur, it can only increase altruism within groups. Self-help, power maximization, and fear are strategies to survive nature, not just contemporary international politics. Mearsheimer outlines five assumptions or premises comprising his theoretical . 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. The very existence of these phenomena, not to mention the extreme efforts and expense they continually require to function, only supports the point that international politics needs very special and powerful arrangements to prevent people from acting as offensive realistspredisposed as they are to do so. 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. Note that the table captures key patterns, not universal behavior. 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. Third, it is important to remember that the empirical observation of altruism in nature does not imply or demand group selection. In this article, we ask whether the three core assumptions about behavior in offensive realismself-help, power maximization, and outgroup fearhave any basis in scientific knowledge about human behavioral evolution. Second, critics of offensive realism point to countering factors such as the democratic peace or international institutions. Cooperation and peace efforts often fail precisely because people have too rosy a view of human nature and thus fail to structure incentives effectively. However, if unconstrained from having to fit evolutionary insights into any particular existing school of thought, evolutionary theory may offer its own, unique theory of international relations that shares features of offensive realism (and perhaps other theories too) but is distinct from them all. The strategic allocation of resources to others often advances ones own Darwinian fitness. 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. Our theory advances offensive realist arguments without seeking an ultimate cause in the anarchic international state system. 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. They can only be regional hegemons. It is therefore no surprise, as psychologists have argued, that evolution has favored a bias to be fearful of strangers to avoid the costlier error.Reference Haselton and Nettle146,Reference Rozin and Royzman147. and Humans may pursue self-interest and power by many means, including, for example, patience and reciprocity as well as coercion and violence. View all Google Scholar citations Mearsheimer's theory is built on five bedrock assumptions. The ultimate causation offered by Morgenthau, the major theorist of classical realism, is noumenaloutside the realm of what science can investigate and demonstrate.Reference Morgenthau23,Reference Morgenthau24 Morgenthau argued that an animus dominandi (desire for power) motivates humans, but he did not explain how such a spirit may be derived logically from his theory or how his theory could be tested scientifically. Where a states own security is threatened or the state becomes vulnerable to exploitation, alliances offer one means of increasing or preserving power. 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. 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. Second, the group might seek an alternative for the resource, perhaps through technological innovation or by substitution. He is the author of Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions (Harvard University Press, 2004), which argues that common psychological biases to maintain overly positive images of our capabilities, our control over events, and the future play a key roles in causing war, and, with Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), which examines how and why popular misperceptions commonly create undeserved victories or defeats in wars and crises. Correspondence: Dominic D. P. Johnson, Alastair Buchan Professor ofInternational Relations, Department of Politics andInternational Relations, University of Oxford, St. Antonys College, 62 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6JF, United Kingdom. 2022. Again, the political world mirrors nature: Not everyone can be the alpha male. Anarchy allows Waltz to argue that states must behave much the way Morgenthau expected, but for different reasons. In short, offensive realism may really be describing the nature of the human species more than the nature of the international system. Looking at the environment in which our own species evolved, we find significant empirical evidence for, and a Darwinian logic favoring, intergroup aggression. John J. Mearsheimer | Biography, Books, & Facts | Britannica Egoism and dominance are important mechanisms for attaining security, but also important is attaining security from members of other groups. In this section, we have presented standard biological arguments that egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias are deeply rooted behavioral adaptations common among mammals in general and primate species in particular. 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. However, we argue that offensive realists need not depend on the anarchy of the state system to advance their argument. Egoism and dominance arose as strategies that provided solutions to achieving survival and reproduction in this environment. Third, critics point to international cooperation among states as evidence against offensive realism. Offensive realism, a theory of international relations, holds that states are disposed to competition and conflict because they are self-interested, power maximizing, and fearful of other states. 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. On the importance of resource harvesting for the development of dominance hierarchies, see James L. Boone, Competition, conflict, and the development of social hierarchies, in. The theory might thus be extended to explain the behavior and actions of many phenomena: the Roman Empire, warfare among Papua New Guinean or Native American tribes, the European conquest of South America, the race for the American west and the failed Mormon and Confederate secessions, the imperialist scrambles over African colonies, institutions like the medieval Catholic Church, commercial organizations from the East India Company to Coca-Cola, the struggles of rival ethnic groups the world over, and the ruthlessness of electoral campaigns. 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. 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 However, while the resulting behavior may have been adaptive in our ancestral environment, it may be maladaptive, or even disastrous, today. Indeed, a wide range of empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience suggests instead that humans, especially men, not only want to be leaders but also enjoy the pursuit of power (as well as its material fruits).156,Reference Robertson157,158 The force of this motivation is frequently revealed in victors expressions of the satisfaction of conquest. 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. Fourth, we have argued that evolutionary insights closely match offensive realism among existing theories of international relations. 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. 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. 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. In some species, reproductive access is settled by coercion, in which the strongest male defeats rivals to dominate a harem. We recognize that a challenge to the theory of offensive realism is the empirical mix of cooperation and conflict in the real world. We thank Robert Jervis for bringing this point to our attention. The motivation for such conquests does not, of course, involve conscious planning to attain larger territories or more offspring. Evolutionary theory is especially helpful here because it advances our understanding of the proximate (biological) causes of offensive realist behavior and the conditions under which mistakes are more likely to be made (i.e., conditions that exacerbate egoistic, dominating, and groupish behaviors even where such behaviors may not help to achieve strategic goals). 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. Thus far, we have emphasized a state of anarchy in evolutionary history, in which there was no overarching power to provide protection from predators, rivals, or other threats. However, an evolutionary perspective is particularly useful here because it predicts that behavior is contingent, not fixed. 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. However, rapid advances in the life sciences offer increasing theoretical and empirical challenges to scholars in the social sciences in general and international relations in particular, who are therefore under increasing pressure to address and integrate this knowledge rather than to suppress or ignore it. 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. As Mearsheimer and others acknowledge, power maximization may not always be a good strategy and, indeed, it has led a number of states into disaster. Review: In 'Hamnet,' Shakespeare Becomes Soap Opera An article adapted from the book had previously been published by Foreign Affairs. Like egoism, the desire to dominate is a trait of human nature (which, as with egoism, we stress does not necessarily apply to every individual or situation but is a statistical tendency underlying behavior). By making implicit assumptions about human behavior explicit, offensive realism may become a more powerful theory. This idea is important because, if individuals are working for the good of the group rather than only for themselves, then groups composed of more-cooperative individuals may do better than less-cooperative groups, meaning that genuinely altruistic traits (sacrificing ones own interests for the good of others) can spread in the population.Reference Wilson184,Reference Wilson and Sober185 However, there are several reasons why this possibility does not affect our argument.