Neorealism

Regional Neorealism: Rethinking Geography and Geopolitical Competition

Anthony Heron • Mar 29 2025 • Articles

Regional neorealism brings both offensive and defensive schools together to produce a lens for a planet in flux.

Neorealism’s Regional Blindspot: The Arctic and South China Sea

Anthony Heron • Mar 21 2025 • Articles

Neorealism’s greatest flaw isn’t in its core assumptions about power and security, but in its inability to recognize that the international system is not experienced in a consistent manner.

Review – Bandwagoning in International Relations

Alexandre Haym • Feb 29 2024 • Features

Dylan Motin explores the idea of bandwagoning with great powers in contemporary Asia and Europe, but could do with more discussion of the accompanying theories.

North Korea’s Withdrawal from the NPT: Neorealism and Selectorate Theory

Su Bai • Jan 27 2022 • Essays

Both neorealism and the selectorate theory show that North Korea’s demand for nuclear weapons strongly correlates with a large US military presence in East Asia.

Review – Hans Kelsen’s Political Realism

Felix Rösch • Jul 22 2021 • Features

Schuett’s work highlights Kelsen’s often overlooked contributions to IR, but raises questions over the conflation of strands of realist thought and the pessimism of mid-century thinkers.

Fear and Freud in Politics: Critical Notes on Mearsheimer’s Structural Realism

Robert Schuett • Sep 4 2020 • Articles

We can use Freudian psychoanalytical theory as one possible way to look at how structures in world politics can be explained and tested for their resilience.

Review – The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth

Luke Cooper • Jul 4 2019 • Features

Mandelbaum’s book is an analytically flawed, contradictory and unconventional piece of realist scholarship that considers the instability of the post-Cold War period.

Saving Grace or Achilles Heel? The Odd Relationship Between Nuclear Weapons and Neo-Realism

Adam P. MacDonald • Oct 25 2018 • Articles

Its time for Neo-Realists to quit using nuclear weapons as anomaly fixers, even if this necessities a fundamental reworking of their basic principles.

Introducing Realism in International Relations Theory

Sandrina Antunes and Isabel Camisão • Feb 27 2018 • Articles

Realism claims to explain the reality of international politics by emphasising the constraints on politics that result from humankind’s nature and the absence of a central authority above the state.

A Contemporary Perspective on Realism

Felix Rösch and Richard Ned Lebow • Feb 17 2018 • Articles

Realism, especially in its classical form, is far from being ready for the dustbin of the history of IR theory – as some critics suggest.

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