ABSTRACT
After the end of the Cold War, realism has been again on the defensive. 1 A first debate was triggered by a piece John Vasquez (1997) published in the American Political Science Review. In this blunt attack, Vasquez argued that realists reject the systematic use of scientific criteria for assessing theoretical knowledge. Vasquez charged (neo)realism either for producing blatantly banal statements or for being non-falsifiable, i. e. ideological. A second debate followed an article by Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik (1999) in International Security. Realists were asked to accept that their recent work was good only because they have incorporated ideas and causal variables from other approaches. Here, realism is not denied scientific status. But by being allotted a small and usually insufficient terrain on the academic turf, realism becomes structurally dependent on a division of theoretical labour defined elsewhere.
