As such, an evolutionary account does not necessarily expect animals, humans, or states to act as offensive realists all the time and in all situations. In environments where resources are highly contested, outgroup fear can become extreme. The fact that these evolved behaviors are not always beneficial today does nothing to undermine their evolutionary logic or empirical presence. The impressive design, by Tom Piper, comprises two very tall ladders, and . The constraints on biological group selection, such as significant differences in a given trait between groups and low migration, are relaxed in the case of cultural traits, since groups actively promote cultural distinctions and have many mechanisms to prevent flows between them.Reference Richerson and Boyd190 Therefore, it is not just likely but quite apparent that many cultural traits have evolved out of group-level competitionsometimes referred to as memes, as opposed to genes. Indeed, there is a considerable literature on animal and human adaptations for cooperation.Reference Fehr and Fischbacher170,Reference Dugatkin171,172 However, while cooperation is frequent and widespread, this empirical observation does nothing to dent the evolutionary logic that cooperation helps the helperit evolved to occur only where it brings return benefits.Reference Trivers173,174 This is precisely why the cooperation literature has remained so heated. Behavior under anarchy in different domains. 4 (December 1997), pp. Additionally,. Strikingly, therefore, behavioral dispositions that enhanced success in the small-scale intergroup anarchy of humans evolutionary past may have endowed us with behaviors that also enhance success in the anarchy of the international system. Our theory advances offensive realist arguments without seeking an ultimate cause in the anarchic international state system. Mearsheimer's theory is a spin-off of Kenneth Waltz's neorealism, also known as structural or defensive realism. Let us begin, therefore, by situating offensive realism in the realist paradigm moregenerally. However, what is striking is the prevalence and potency of dominance in social organization, despite variations in the specifics. Total loading time: 0 Although Mearsheimer recognized war as a legitimate instrument of statecraft, he did not believe that it was always justified. Combining the previous two considerations (leaders and sex) raises another problem: If leaders are especially egoistic and domineering, and if sex is a primary cause, does this not mean that we predict state leaders will undertake actions (consciously or subconsciously) that serve to maximize their own personal reproductive opportunitiesperhaps at the expense of state interests? Others are even older, such as the limbic system, hormones, and sexual dimorphism, which are shared by countless species extending across all mammals and beyond. As Chinggis Khan is purported to have said: The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes.159 Although not usually expressed in such stark terms, the pleasure of competition and victory has been widely recognized as a feature of human nature from classical times to the present day, and success in competitive interactions and the domination of others are known to increase testosterone and dopamine responses in menthe so-called victory effect.160 Such dominance behavior is, we suggest, exaggerated among leaders because they are generally ambitious and competitive, and usually male. Debate continues as to whether modern states actually do, or should, behave in this way, but we are struck by a different question. His current work focuses on evolutionary dynamics, evolutionary psychology, and religion in human conflict and cooperation. Table1. Rather, we suggest it is an example of what biologists call evolutionary convergencesimilar traits arising in different settings because they are good solutions to a common problem. Psychologists argue that the ingroup/outgroup distinction develops from a need for social identity. The strength of dominance hierarchies in humans is debated and varies empirically, but such hierarchies are always evident in some form or other. We do not assume that humans and our primate cousins simply inherited these traits wholesale from a common ancestor. Some evidence suggests that the separation between common chimpanzees and bonobos was quite recent, occurring perhaps only 0.86 million to 0.89 million years ago, although it remains possible that the separation occurred much earlier, between 1.5 million to 2.5 million years ago.Reference Won and Hey166 Either way, humans separated from our common ancestor with both chimpanzee species long before, about 5 million to 6 million years ago. As we have noted, offensive realism contains explicit assumptions about how states behave in international politicsgiven the hostile environment, states are (and ought to be if they are to survive) self-interested, power maximizing, and fearful of others. Published online by Cambridge University Press: Competition for resources results in situations where consumption by one individual or group diminishes the amount available for others, or where one individual or group controls the distribution of resources and thus can deny them to others.Reference Meggitt63,Reference Keeley64, In the Pleistocene era, any group facing a shortage of resources (or a need for more, as the group expands) could have adopted one or a combination of three basic strategies. Second, we introduce key evolutionary concepts that explicate the human behaviors upon which offensive realism depends. Rather, as Mearsheimer points out, states do best if they expand only when the opportunity for gains presents itselfthey try to figure out when to raise and when to fold.163 Evolution has been doing this for a long time. One reason why an evolutionary explanation of egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias is useful is because alternative explanations for these empirical traits have failed. Natural selection generates contingent behavior because it is more effective than blind aggression. We recognize that a challenge to the theory of offensive realism is the empirical mix of cooperation and conflict in the real world. An organized social structure can help promote the harvesting of resources, coordinate group activity, and reduce within-group conflict. Mearsheimer follows on the premises of Kenneth Waltz's theory by deriving the behavior of states from the "structure" of the international system. Wilson captures the evolutionary logic succinctly, saying that humans would fight wars when they and their closest relatives stand to gain long-term reproductive success, and he continues, despite appearances to the contrary, warfare may be just one example of the rule that cultural practices are generally adaptive in a Darwinian sense.Reference Wilson73 An evolutionary approach allows the expectation that contemporary humans possess specific behavioral traits that contributed to fitness in the past, including the willingness to fight to retain or gain the resources necessary so that the individual, the family, and the extended family group would continue to survive and reproduce.Reference Lopez74, Unsurprisingly, direct evidence of human behavior from the Pleistocene era is rare, but in addition to archeological finds, we have evidence from recent and contemporary indigenous societies that offer a model for the behavior of our distant ancestors, who lived under similar social and ecological conditions. Note that we did not pick the traits of egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias out of a hat. First, offensive realism fails to explain why costly wars sometimes occur against the interests of the states that initiate them. Although it is not our intention to resolve offensive realisms theoretical lacunae, an evolutionary account can help to explain them. This collective benefit points to the special and much more significant role of anarchy at a higher levelanarchy between groups. However, an overtone of this argument is that power or domination is distasteful for leadersthat they tolerate it only for the sake of their states security. Where these conditions are tempered, such as in the modern peaceful democracies of Western Europe, these cognitive and physiological mechanisms are likely to be more subdued. The theory of Mearsheimer has five basis assumptions: 1. Note that we do not intend to make the full case forthe role of evolution in human behavior. Clearly, not all individuals or businesses or states act the same way all the time or in all circumstances. Sexual selection is typically responsible for the hierarchical nature of group-living animal species, including humans, as males fight for rank and the reproductive benefits in brings. Of particular note regarding the impact of dominance on human behavior are the roles of both phylogeny (a species ancestral lineage) and ecology (its adaptations to local conditions). As we would expect, this leads to sex differences in the desire for status. Indeed, part of the beauty of evolutionary approaches is their ability to predict sources of variationthe socio-ecological conditions under which we should expect to see humans acting (in this case) more fearful and more self-interested, and pursuing more power maximization, rather than less. To the extent that cultural group selection extends back into our evolutionary past, cultural traits have not been consistently or powerfully contrary to the evolved traits of egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias. Whether or not humans and chimpanzees inherited warlike propensities from a common ancestor, there was nevertheless a strong selection pressure in both species to develop them. } II, Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History, Five rules for the evolution of cooperation, 16 common misconceptions about the evolution of cooperation in humans, Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behaviour and the Quest for Status, Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership, Teeth, horns and antlers: The weapons of sex, States in mind: Evolution, coalitional psychology, and international politics, Sex Differences: Summarizing More Than a Century of Scientific Research, Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight, Sex differences in leadership emergence during competitions within and between groups, The feeling of rationality: The meaning of neuroscientific advances for political science, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Violence and sociality in human evolution, Policing stabilizes construction of social niches in primates, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, Managing ingroup and outgroup relationships, What we know about bias and intergroup conflict, problem of the century, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression, The coevolution of parochial altruism and war, Groups in mind: The coalitional roots of war and morality, Human Morality and Sociality: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, Meeting at Grand Central: Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation, The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases, Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion, Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making, Political Psychology in International Relations, The Winner Effect: How Power Affects Your Brain, Chimpanzees and the mathematics of battle, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, Why Nations Cooperate: Circumstance and Choice in International Relations, Divergence population genetics of chimpanzees, All Apes Great and Small. Much of Thayers scholarship centers onlife-sciences insights into political-behavioral topics, including the origins of war and ethnic conflict and the dynamics of suicide terrorism. It is not just that we lack a global Leviathan today; humans never had such a luxury. First, as with other realist theories, Mearsheimer assumes that the . Rather, we build on an accumulation of knowledge about human evolution and behavior derived from anthropology, evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, evolutionary game theory, genetics, and neuroscience. and The brain may be responding exactly as it was designed to do, given informational inputs from the environment. We do not need to resort to group selection unless altruism cannot be explained by more conventional mechanisms based on individual selection. Between groups, group selection would do the opposite, maintaining or even exacerbating conflict.187 Because the premise is that selection operates at the level of groups, altruistic traits can only spread if altruism helps spread the genes responsible for it at the expense of other genes, and that must occur via intergroup competition or conflict. We do not, however, need to rely on mere analogies linking animal and human behavior. However, the Ngogo group and their neighbors are chimpanzees. Evolutionary theory offers a powerful explanation for the trait of egoism (by which we mean the nonpejorative definition of self-regarding, prompted by self-interest).86 Given competition for limited resources and threats from predators and the environment, an individual organism is primed to seek its own survival andthe Darwinian bottom linereproductive success. Mearsheimer's theory operates on five core assumptions. His most recent book, with Brian Mazanec, is Deterring Cyber Warfare: Bolstering StrategicStability in Cyberspace (Palgrave, 2014). Our theory is also unlimited in domain, explaining behavior wherever there are human actors and weak external constraints on their actions, from ancestral human groups, ethnic conflict, and civil wars to domestic politics, free markets, and international relations. Core Assumptions of Realism (5) 1. Because states operate with imperfect information in a complicated world, they sometimes make serious mistakes. Anarchy is, ironically, the ordering principle of the global state system and the starting point for most major theories of international politics, such as neoliberalism and neorealism.42,Reference Keohane43,Reference Jervis44,Reference Nye45 Other theoretical approaches, such as constructivism, also acknowledge the impact of anarchy, even if only to consider why anarchy occurs and how it can be circumvented.Reference Wendt46,Reference Onuf47 Indeed, the anarchy concept is so profound that it defines and divides the discipline of political science into international politics (politics under conditions of anarchy) and domestic politics (politics under conditions of hierarchy, or government). They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. However, there is, of course, considerable variation in egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias. Humans and chimpanzees shared some features of their socio-ecological environment, such as spatially and temporally variable food resources, which required that individuals leave the protection of the group to forage in open or bordering areas, often alone or in small groups, subjecting them to greater risks of predation or ambush from conspecifics.Reference wrangham, Pilbeam, Galdikas, Briggs, Sheeran, Shapiro and Goodall167 In contrast, the ecology of bonobos has been relatively benign. As we show in the next section, competition between groups is especially significant for human evolution, and for international politics, precisely because it is at the intergroup level where anarchy reigns supreme and is much harder to suppress. Where a states own security is threatened or the state becomes vulnerable to exploitation, alliances offer one means of increasing or preserving power. These types of adaptations not only consume precious time and energy but can also decrease survival in other, nonreproductive domains of life (for example, the plumage of male peacocks limits their ability to fly). Many models of consumer behavior include fundamental assumptions which are rarely questioned. 5-57; Eric J.Labs, "Beyond Victory: Offensive Realism and the Expansion of War Aims,"Security Studies,Vol. The most enduring theories of international relations, therefore, will be ones that are able to incorporate (or at least do not run against the grain of) evolutionary theory. In fact, he was highly critical of the Iraq War (200311) and what he saw as an attempt by the United States to police the world. Ethological studies have shown that hierarchical dominance systems within a primate groups social network can reduce overt aggression, although aggression increases again when the alpha male is challenged.Reference Knauft116,Reference Flack, Girvan, de Waal and Krakauer117,Reference de Waal118. In 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. This story might have come from any number of bloody human conflicts around the world. All three species descended from an (unknown) common ancestor. Our approach also suggests that if offensive realism is a product of human nature, rather than merely a consequence of international anarchy, it can be broadened to explain human conflict at many levels, from tribal warfare, ethnic conflict, and civil wars to domestic politics, commercial competition, and international relations. The international system is anarchic. In this article, A key debate in evolutionary anthropology has revolved around the origins and extent of intergroup conflict among hunter-gatherers, and the emerging consensus is that such conflict is (and has long been) significant and widespread, and that it serves adaptive functions.59, Let us first consider these functional advantages. The key finding is that humans quickly adopt an us (ingroup) versus them (outgroup) worldview. However, even fellow realists have found problems and inconsistencies with Waltz's structural realism. Chimpanzees with larger territories have higher body weights, and females in those territories give birth to more offspring. Warfare might then be necessary for offensive purposes, to plunder resources from others. 17 This is why he considers the US a regional hegemon, not a global one. 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Efforts to make positive political change may be more effective if we view humans as offensive realists and intervene accordingly. or Kenneth Waltz's structural realism. When the stakes are high enough, individuals as well as states all too easily revert to egoism, dominance, and fear. The fact that all prior utopian visions have failed to come to fruition does not prove that current ones will fail too. Up to now, our claims have focused on traits that are common to all humans. Given the prominence of the concept in present-day international relations theory, it is striking that anarchy only took hold as a central feature of scholarship in recent decades, since the publication of Kenneth Waltzs Theory of International Politics in 1979. Egoism and dominance arose as strategies that provided solutions to achieving survival and reproduction in this environment. See. The core idea of offensive realism is that a state most reliably ensures its security by maximizing its power. In addition to fighting over resources, we can now fight over ideology as well. A recurrent criticism of any theory of international relations based on the role of individuals is why we should expect individual behavior to tell us anything about state behavior. While this may be true in western, industrialized . Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. As we have explained, there are several mechanisms by which altruistic or helping behavior can (and have) evolved because of the benefits of helping others that accrue to oneselfnot least, altruistic behavior among kin, reciprocity, and reputation formation. By contrast, our theory posits that a tendency toward offensive realist behavior, however modulated by other tendencies, would have conferred a fitness advantage in the environment in which humans evolved and should thus have led to dispositions to seek and like power. The anarchic state of the international system means that states cannot be certain of other states' intentions and their security, thus prompting them to . The way this framework affects the conceptualisation of power in Mearsheimer's realism will be examined first through the examination of his . He received a D.Phil. By 2009, after 18 such killings, the rival group had been all but destroyed. What is the logic for risking life and limb in engaging in violent aggression against other groups?