ABSTRACT
The implications of the realist tradition for a concept of peace are associated with a victor and its norms, institutions and perspectives of social, economic and political systems. It is also seen as a foil for the idealist and liberal hybrid version of peace that was partly being contested in the first ‘great debate’. Where idealist and liberal versions offered a positive epistemology of peace, realism offered a negative epistemology based upon survival as Wight argued, and a victor’s peace that Tacitus might have recognised. The resultant version of peace and its sustainability are dependent upon a victor’s hegemony. Realism sees IR as a state of war that cannot be overcome by anything other than a Leviathan.3 It is a debate rather than a concrete argument, but it suggests a continuing cycle of violence and coercively induced stability (which is the nearest it comes to peace), as opposed to liberalism’s progressive view. It rests upon what Jim George has argued to be a set of crude characterisations of the thought of the likes of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Morganthau and Carr,4 who are represented both as the founders of realism and of the discipline of IR. Common assumptions are shared across the spectrum of realist thought that draws together a selection of ‘great texts’ specifically about the problem of anarchy because of the lack of an overarching power, and the eternal laws of self-interest that govern human and state behaviour. There are many subtle differences between what are known as classical, scientific positivist, neorealist and structural realist strands of the tradition, of course. However, power, sovereignty, national interest and human nature are taken to be perennial and tragic, reflecting the Augustinian notion of ‘fallen man’ and, of course, the whole range of normative assumptions upon which this was based.5
