International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   International relations (IR) sports a variety of foundation myths, among them a defeated Athenian general of the fifth century BCE, a brace of early modern philosophers, and the first Chair of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1919 (cf. Schmidt 1998 ). Central to any of these legends are matters of war and peace, whether the decades-long contest between Athens and Sparta, the problem of legitimate order amid civil war in Hobbes' England, the survival and flourishing of the principality in the treacherous world of Machiavelli's Italy, or the great conflagration of World War I. On any retelling, security relations are at the heart of the discipline. Yet there is a curious limitation in the way security is constructed in the foundation myths, as essentially a problem between the great powers of the day. In disciplinary argot, what is founded is the still predominant “states under anarchy” approach (cf. Nexon and Wright 2007 ). How states manage or resolve the ever present possibility of war among “like units” with “no common power” is amenable to realist, liberal, and constructivist analyses, and as such is the site of defining debates in security studies and IR ( Waltz 1979 ; Wendt 1992 ). The wars that really matter on scales of destruction and significance are those between great powers. Another kind of security ... log in or subscribe to read full text