ABSTRACT
Kenneth Waltz is the most cited author in modern IR. One major reason for that is his creation of a coherent set of provocations challenging fashionable viewpoints in significant-though shifting-segments of the IR community. He says, for instance, that systemic interdependence is low and that this has been beneficial, that states can be seen as unitary actors, that non-state actors are relatively insignificant, that nuclear weapons are beneficial, that superpower superiority was a good thing, that the USA has behaved much like the Soviet Union in the postwar period, that the domino theory is false and much of US global activism therefore redundant, that we don’t ‘live in a world of change’, that bipolarity persists, etc. Waltz is often identified with two books, Theory of International Politics (1979) and Man, the State, and War (1959)—in that order of preference. Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics from 1967 comparing British and US foreign policymaking is less well known. When references are made to ‘the book’ or ‘the theory’ by Waltz, the 1979 book is the one at stake. Its essence had appeared in 1975 in ‘Theory of International Relations’, Waltz’s contribution to Handbook of Political Science. In 1986, Robert Keohane edited Neo-realism and Its Critics, in which Waltz was given the opportunity to respond to some of his critics (apart from the critical contributions, this volume also reprinted the essential part of the theory). In addition to discussing these works, I shall also deal in this chapter with Waltz’s more recent articles addressing the post-1989 world.
