Session 9: Simplifying the International Structure?

Kenneth Waltz, being a perpetuator of Realism, in his article attempts to explain the structure of the international forum where he considers states to have a primary goal of self-survival, trying to co-exist with one and another. He also mentions about the balance of power and how states are forced to act in their self-interests to maintain or gain more power over the other states (units). However we already have studied about these things in the previous classes so there is no need to waste more time on talking about these particular issues.

One thing which I found very interesting in Waltz piece was his argument for study politics alone and then observe its impact on the international structure. The example he gives is a relevant one which states that when studying economics we don’t consider other factors affecting the economic outcomes then why cannot we do the same when studying politics and its impact on the international structure. I agree with his main argument which is to separate politics from economics and social sciences. It is just like running a regression in economics controlling for all the other factors to see the causal effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable. Waltz argues for a similar kind of technique where we should control for social sciences etc. when studying politics.

As far as pure theory is concerned, Waltz does give a good account of how he thinks the international structure should be formed. However, the main strength of his theory of how to study politics is the practicality of it where studying politics alone without looking at other effects is not a very difficult thing to do after all.