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2. Past trends are no guarantee of future trends. Until the 70s, for instance, U.S. economic growth was closely correlated with both energy use and carbon emissions; after the 70s, this correlation broke down completely and the lines started moving in opposite directions. Degrowthers present historical curves as if these are laws of nature, but we know that they are not. The trend is your friend only til the bend at the end. And the fact that rich countries have hit an inflection point where economic growth no longer depends on growing resource use is a strong indicator that industrializing countries like China will also hit this point as well. (And no, falling use in rich countries is mostly not due to outsourcing, as the emissions graph above illustrates.)

The other scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth and similar philippics, the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc. (In 1980 Paul Ehrlich famously bet the economist Julian Simon that five of these metals would become scarcer and hence more expensive by the end of the decade; he lost all five bets. Indeed, most metals and minerals are cheaper today than they were in I960.)— From the 1970s to the early 2000s newsmagazines periodically illustrated cover stories on the world's oil supply with a gas gauge pointing to Empty. In 2013 The Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled "We Will Never Run Out of Oil."

And then there are rare earths like yttrium, scandium, europium, and lanthanum, which you may remember from the periodic table in your chemistry classroom or from the Tom Lehrer song "The Elements." These metals are a critical component of magnets, fluorescent lights, video screens, catalysts, lasers, capacitors, optical glass, and other high-tech applications. When they started running out, we were warned, there would be critical shortages, a collapse of the technology industry, and perhaps war with China, the source of 95 percent of the world's supply. That's what led to the Great Europium Crisis of the late 20th century, when the world ran out of the critical ingredient in the red phosphor dots in the cathode-ray tubes in color televisions and computer monitors and society was divided between the haves, who hoarded the last working color TVs, and the angry have-nots, who were forced to make do with black-and-white. What, you never heard of it? Among the reasons there was no such crisis was that cathode-ray tubes were superseded by liquid crystal displays made of common elements.14 And the Rare Earths War? In reality, when China squeezed its exports in 2010 (not because of shortages but as a geopolitical and mercantilist weapon), other countries started extracting rare earths from their own mines, recycling them from industrial waste, and re-engineering products so they no longer needed them.

Most people seem to think that the world economy is going through a temporary disruption, caused by a novel coronavirus. As soon as COVID-19 goes away, they expect the economy will be back to normal. I think that this assessment is overly optimistic. The way I see the situation, the world economy was already having severe growth problems, caused indirectly by resource problems, even before COVID-19 hit.

In a growing world economy, a person might expect that workers would be getting richer, so that they could afford an increasing quantity of goods and services. What we really see is something very different. The number of new automobiles sold was falling in many major countries long before COVID-19 hit, even as population was generally rising. Clearly, something was seriously wrong.

For almost forty-five years, since the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth, a sliver of the environmental movement has struggled to frame unending economic growth as a core driver of environmental harm. They argue that an ever-expanding economy generates exponentially increasing pressures on environmental systems that will inevitably carry us beyond the “safe operating space” of the planet. From the depletion of forests and fisheries, to ocean plastic pollution and climate change, it is the staggering growth in the volume of materials extracted, products consumed, and waste produced that brings us to the doorstep of an environmental unraveling. Emergent “green” technologies—renewable energy, polyculture agriculture, decarbonized transportation systems, reduced product packaging, and the like—can blunt these impacts, but not for long, since their ameliorative effects are quickly swamped by the environmental penalty of additional growth. To reap lasting benefits from these technological innovations, we need a suite of parallel social innovations to release us from political and economic systems addicted to growth.2

These arguments have largely fallen on deaf ears. Rather than viewing economic growth as a source of environmental degradation, most see it as essential to sustainability. To them, an ever-expanding economy drives technological innovation while lifting billions out of environmentally destructive poverty. Growth also means more government revenue, which supports ambitious environmental initiatives at no cost to other programs, thus avoiding nasty political conflict. From this vantage point, growth is the solution, not the problem, so long as it is environmentally sound growth. The job of higher education is to train students and to conduct research that produces the technologies and practices that fuel this growth and turns it from “brown” to “green.”

“Rates of growth across member states of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have been in decline since the 1970s, a phenomenon known as ‘secular stagnation’. The average growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita fell from over 4 percent in the mid-1960s to little more than 1 percent in the pre-pandemic years. The International Monetary Fund expects global GDP to decline by 5 percent this year alone (2020) with a contraction of 3 percent likely even in the emerging and developing market economies.”

Other authors, like Dr Tim Morgan, think there are reasons to believe that secular stagnation will, in the future, not only be an issue in the OECD countries. Secular stagnation, and then worse, is the fate of countries like China too. Biophysical limits to growth are increasingly being reached everywhere. The depletion of oil, gas and coal means it is necessary to tap higher cost sources of energy – including in China.

Yet it is very unlikely that the kind of transition envisaged could begin unless there is major breakdown in the existing consumer-capitalist system. As long as it keeps the supermarket shelves stocked, discontent is likely to be muted, and focused on demands for more jobs and higher incomes rather than system replacement. The Goldilocks outcome would seem to be an economic depression that falls short of catastrophic breakdown, but is serious enough to convince large numbers that the system is not going to provide for them.

The challenge to the Left

The consequences of going without power for months, across a large swath of the United States, would be devastating. Backup electrical generators in hospitals and other vulnerable facilities would have to rely on fuel that would be in high demand. Diabetics would go without their insulin; heart attack victims would not have their defibrillators; and sick people would have no place to go. Businesses would run out of inventory and extra capacity. Grocery stores would run out of food, and deliveries of all sorts would virtually cease (no gasoline for trucks and airplanes, trains would be down). As we saw with the blackouts caused by Hurricane Sandy, gas stations couldn't pump gas from their tanks, and fuel-carrying trucks wouldn't be able to fill up at refueling stations. Without power, the economy would virtually cease, and if power failed over a large enough portion of the country, simply trucking in supplies from elsewhere would not be adequate to cover the needs of hundreds of millions of people.

In a piece explicitly defending bloated military budgets, however, perhaps it would be useful to know what exactly the “Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments” is.  We can start by reading this  taken directly from their website (unabridged):

Below is a list of organizations that have contributed to our efforts over the past three years.

In summary, six of the nine proposed planetary boundaries (phosphorous, nitrogen, biodiversity, land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution) are unlikely to be associated with existential risks. They all correspond to a degraded environment, but in our assessment do not represent existential risks. However, the three remaining boundaries (climate change, global freshwater cycle, and ocean acidification) do pose existential risks. This is because of intrinsic positive feedback loops, substantial lag times between system change and experiencing the consequences of that change, and the fact these different boundaries interact with one another in ways that yield surprises. In addition, climate, freshwater, and ocean acidification are all directly connected to the provision of food and water, and shortages of food and water can create conflict and social unrest.

Climate change has a long history of disrupting civilizations and sometimes precipitating the collapse of cultures or mass emigrations (McMichael, 2017). For example, the 12th century drought in the North American Southwest is held responsible for the collapse of the Anasazi pueblo culture. More recently, the infamous potato famine of 1846–1849 and the large migration of Irish to the U.S. can be traced to a combination of factors, one of which was climate. Specifically, 1846 was an unusually warm and moist year in Ireland, providing the climatic conditions favorable to the fungus that caused the potato blight. As is so often the case, poor government had a role as well—as the British government forbade the import of grains from outside Britain (imports that could have helped to redress the ravaged potato yields).

Months after the Breakthrough Institute released their 2015 ecomodernist manifesto, the declaration’s ideological binding started coming unglued. Breakthrough’s Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger met ridicule trying to sell the manifesto at a public event in England, and the duo later parted ways, as Shellenberger founded a new organization called Environmental Progress to publicize nuclear energy. The split has been somewhat acrimonious as both try to break from a past that neither seems capable of escaping.

The event in England focused on restoring science to environmentalism, and it was there that they planned to sell ecomodernism to British reporters. Conservative MP Owen Paterson, a climate denier who almost halved the UK’s climate preparedness budget when he was environmental secretary, hosted the media event.

4.3. Assessing the Robustness of the Results The robustness of the results obtained was assessed using alternative models.11 The GDP growth variable (gdp_%_it) was replaced by GDP per capita based on constant prices (gdp_pcap_%_it). This helped to shift the research focus from a country’s economic strength to its level of development. This variable reflects changes in the well-being of the population. The analysis was based on the assumption that a lower or negative growth in real GDP per capita promotes a higher vote share for far-right or far-left parties (Brückner – Grüner 2010). The unemployment rate variable (unemp_dif_it) was replaced by employment rate variable (emp_rate_dif_it). Low employment (see Hungary and Portugal) suggests that a significant part of the productive-age population is not able or willing to work. This economically inactive labour force may also comprise people who gave up trying to find a job after a long period submitting futile applications (i.e. discouraged workers). The third economic indicator used in the analysis is the share of general government gross debt in GDP (debt_gdp_it). Some of the EU countries included in this research became so severely hit by the economic crisis that they were unable to maintain a sustainable fiscal policy and were forced to ask international institutions (EU, IMF, and the World Bank) for a bailout. These countries recorded significant growth in indebtedness. The general government gross debt for all the EU countries included in the research in 2012 reached an average of 71.8% of GDP. The assumption is that growing indebtedness increases the vote share of far-right or far-left parties, due to either expected, or already implemented restrictive measures. The control variables (controlit) in the estimated models remained unchanged. The results of the alternative models were similar to the results of the models found in Table 1 and Table 3 in the case of the far-right parties. The models revealed that a deterioration in economic variables (represented by growth in GDP per capita, employment rate, and general government gross debt per GDP) did not result in a higher vote share (or share of seats) of far-right parties. The explanatory variable which influenced far-right voters was social benefits. In the Tobit model for vote share as a dependent variable, the immigration growth variable (immig_%_it) was statistically significant at a level of 10%. This proved that far-right voters feared competition from an immigrant labour force. On the other hand, a 1% decline in the employment rate increased the vote share of far-left parties by 1.68 percentage points. The share of seats for far-left parties increased by 2.63 percentage points. The growth in GDP per capita variable (gdp_pcap_%_it) and general government gross debt variable (debt_gdp_it) were not statistically significant in any specifications of the model. Far-left voters were sensitive to changes in the openness of the economy. The statistical significance of the openness of economy variable (open_econ_dif_it) was at a regularly sustained level of 5%. When far-left parties participated in elections in West European countries they usually won a higher vote share and entered the lower house. The legacy of communism prevented similar success for far-left parties in the former the Eastern bloc. However, the number of seats which western farleft parties gained in lower houses did not differ from that of far-left parties in post-communist countries. Decline in voter turnout increased the share of seats of far-left parties in the period observed. The mean value of the electoral district (mean_district_it) has always been without statistical significance. The results obtained can be considered to be robust. The analysis proved that far-right parties’ electorates were influenced by factors other than the main macroeconomic indicators, while those voting for far-left parties were sensitive to the situation in the labour market, as well as the development of international trade. Neither growth in GDP per capita, nor general government gross debt seemed to exercise an influence on electoral decisions on both sides of the ideological spectrum. The empirical analysis showed that economic performance in the set of EU countries influenced the electoral success of far-right and far-left parties in different ways. In the case of the far-right electorate, economic development measured by means of basic macroeconomic indicators proved to be of no significance.

Economic insecurity, whether generated by globalisation, digitalisation or any other cause, is not the sole culprit. Cultural insecurity also plays an important independent role. It is triggered when people feel that the identity of their community is threatened by the arrival, or the growth in numbers or power, of people who do not share their native language, cultural references, religious beliefs, civic customs, dress and other everyday practices. The upsurge in populism is sometimes strongest in places where a thriving labour market provides economic security, but where real, alleged or prospective immigration boosts cultural insecurity.

Both economic and cultural insecurity breed democratic disenchantment because of the feeling that democratic national governments, often bridled by international treaties or constitutional constraints, are unwilling or unable to address them effectively. Because of the largely unstoppable cross-border movement of capital, goods, services and people, and because of the need to keep pace with technological progress, governments often have to capitulate to market forces or resort to laborious supranational decision-making processes, more or less remote and more or less undemocratic. Faced with the impotence of democratic governments, the temptation to call for strong leaders and to embrace simplistic nationalist solutions can seem irresistible.

Why are scientists increasingly concerned about climate tipping points?

There are still many unknowns, but improved climate modeling and new observations create a clearer picture than we’ve had before. Most recently, a study published in Science concluded that we may have already crossed some tipping point thresholds with the 1.1 degrees Celsius of global warming that humans have caused so far. More will become likely if we surpass the 1.5-degree threshold. That’s a significant update to a prior assessment, which suggested we would need to hit 2 degrees Celsius before reaching this state.

Scientists have delivered a “final warning” on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth assessment report on Monday.

Similarly, this deconstructionist framework provides constructivist FSS authors with a basis for their claims about the contrast between feminist and scientific methods. These claims concern a wide range of issues.7 The most important of these for this chapter, however, is the fact that constructivists frequently maintain that feminist methods enjoin researchers to engage with the contextual (or ‘relative’) nature of lived experience, meaning, and truth (e.g. Cohn 2013; Moser and Clark 2001; Sharoni 2001; Wibben 2011, 2016); or, in other words, they have claimed that their idiographic focus provides a corrective against the (neo-)positivist focus on developing objective, (quasi-) nomothetic generalisations/identifying causal laws. Wibben, for instance, suggests that decontextualisation ‘is central to [scientific] approaches striving for objectivity by presenting only what is seen or perceived – without comment or interpretation’ (2011, p. 19). In fact, she approvingly quotes Nancy J. Hirschmann’s claim that ‘[c]ontext is what makes meaning possible’ and ‘meaning makes reality’ (ibid., p. 27). Such claims are frequently accompanied by radical efforts to counter decontextualised, a-social/under-socialised, liberal understandings of human beings. As Natasha Marhia argues, liberal humanism portrays human beings as ‘stable, bounded subject[s]’ and ‘autonomous, rational chooser[s]’ (2013, p. 26). In contrast, constructivist authors claim that this portrayal (1) has been ‘extrapolated from the highly individualistic competitive behavior of Western men in the marketplace’ (Tickner 2005, p. 2177), (2) obscures ‘the matrices of power through which individuals become socially differentiated’ (Marhia 2013, p. 19), and (3) fails to account for how these differentiations ‘can function in exclusionary ways’ (ibid., p. 22). Hence, liberal humanism is understood as a framework that is unable to account for the fact that an individual’s security is ‘to a large extent a function of their social situatedness, their location in a web of interpersonal and social relationships […] and intersecting fields of discourse’ (ibid.).

In summary, constructivists FSS authors conceive of modernist (philosophy of) science as a text or discourse that is complicit in the reproduction of gendered prejudices, biases, and injustices. As a result, they have become increasingly sceptical of the idea that ‘we can locate anything morally and politically worth redeeming or reforming in the scientific world view, its underlying epistemology, or the practices it legitimates’ (Harding in Wibben 2011, p. 18). Importantly, this stance departs from humanist critiques of science, as it rejects their claim that ‘the natural and human sciences are fundamentally different’ (ibid., p. 32). Wibben’s narrative approach, for instance, suggests that one of the main errors of humanism is the fact that it tries to ‘redefine rather than dissolve Enlightenment dualisms’ (ibid.). Instead, constructivists propose what we might term an anti-dualistic universalisation of hermeneutics that ‘takes the text (or discourse) as its unit of analysis’ (Norris in Gentry 2016, p. 25). In contrast with the scientific emphasis on facts and their verification and/or falsification this approach endeavours to examine the political effects of ‘adopting one mode of representation over another’ (Milliken in ibid.). This aim is, of course, characteristic of significant parts of the broader constructivist literature as well. Indeed, constructivist FSS – in its disavowals of mainstream/scientific methods, dualistic thought, essentialism, foundationalism, modernist/liberal humanism, etc. – has self-evidently mirrored the philosophico-methodological orientation that is now generally associated with the cultural turn.

It should be noted, however, that not all of the contributors to this special issue are in fact committed to the adoption of a critical realist philosophical framework in this way. Gillman, Smirthwaite and Swahnberg, and Griffiths take something of an outsider’s or newcomer’s perspective with regard to critical realist philosophy. While these authors relate to critical realism as a framework of interest, none wholeheartedly subscribe to it. As editors of this special issue we were very pleased to receive such contributions, as respectful engagements and interested conversations between critical realists and proponents of perspectives that are more commonly adopted by feminist theorists and gender scholars have unfortunately continued to be few and far between. Sue Clegg, Dimitri Mader and Michiel van Ingen, however, clearly write much more from within the parameters of critical realist philosophy, using its meta-theoretical framework as a means of making interventions in important feminist debates. Although Clegg, in her piece on intersectionality, does engage in some (critical) conversation with popular poststructuralist versions of intersectional theorizing, for instance, the main purpose of her article is to use critical realism as a philosophical underlabourer in order to think through various issues currently arising in discussions about intersectional theory, particularly the relationship between structure and agency. Mader’s contribution also centres on the structure/agency problematic and, like Clegg, draws especially on Margaret Archer’s work. However, whereas Clegg explicitly intervenes in intersectionality theory, whose proponents foreground the multiplicity of different forms of positioning and are often suspicious of an exclusive focus on gender, Mader’s contribution implicitly challenges the ‘intersectional imperative’ (Wiegman 1999, 376) by focusing on the gendered power structure in abstraction from other power relations. There is therefore a crucial (if not explicit) philosophical link between Clegg’s and Mader’s contributions, insofar as the former, while being mainly concerned with intersectionality theory, also argues in favour of engaging in exactly the kind of non-intersectional, ‘separatist’ (Gunnarsson 2015, 10) theoretical projects that Mader’s article exemplifies with its in-depth focus on gendered dominance. Such feminist endeavours, which seek to trace the basic causal mechanisms of patriarchy, have been increasingly difficult to carry out in the contemporary theoretical climate, and this is in significant part due to both the aforementioned intersectional imperative and the more general poststructuralist taboo on structural forms of theorizing.

Importantly, however, it is not intersectional forms of theorizing as such that are considered problematic by critical realist authors such as Clegg and Mader. The basic intersectional claim that social situations, identities and practices are conditioned by a range of intersecting power relations is arguably indisputable. Indeed, it is telling that authors and activists who persist in ignoring that this is the case are generally those who are subordinated only in terms of one, or no, social axis of power. However, while analyses of how different power relations and categorizations complexly intersect are pivotal, they do not allow us to do the equally important work of theorizing, in an in-depth and abstracted manner, the basic causal mechanisms that are exercised by the social/cultural structures that are ‘doing’ the intersecting at a concrete level (cf. Walby, Armstrong and Strid 2012; Martinez Dy, Martin and Marlow 2014; Gunnarsson 2015). As Clegg shows, however, the stratified ontology of critical realism provides helpful forms of support for theorists who wish to carry out analyses at different levels of abstraction. That is to say, it facilitates intersectional analysis where it is needed in order to understand the multi-layered fabric of social life, while not closing the door to ‘nonintersectional’ analyses that focus on how one specific categorical and structural dimension of this social life causally affects a situation of interest. What sets Mader’s contribution to theorizing gender-based domination apart from secondwave, single-issue feminist theory, however, is its engagement with contemporary debates, reflected in the explicit incorporation of the implications of his work for intersectional analyses.

Despite this consensus on what we are trying to explain, the question of what causes war can mean several different things (Suganami 1996). It can refer, first of all, to the question of what makes war possible, to the permissive or logically necessary conditions for war. These fundamental or primary causes of war explain why war repeatedly occurs in international politics, why war can occur at any moment. Thus scholars trace war to human nature, biological instincts, frustration, fear and greed, the existence of weapons, and similar factors. Peace, however, is far more common than war, though as a “non-event” peace is difficult to measure. At the systemic level there may be more years characterized by war than by peace, but in nearly all war years most states are at peace, and at the dyadic level war is rare (Bremer 1992). This makes it hard to argue that human nature and related factors are causes of war. The point is that these factors are constants and cannot explain the variations in war and peace over time and space (Waltz 1959, Cashman 1993). If human nature varies, as some argue, then it is the sources of that variation, not human nature itself, that explain behavior. Moreover, even if human nature or biologically based instincts could explain aggressive behavior at the individual level, they cannot explain when such aggression leads to domestic violence, when it leads to scapegoating or other outlets, when it is resolved, and when it leads to international war. The question of how to explain variations in war and peace is the second meaning of the broader question of what causes war. Why does war occur at some times rather than other times, between some states rather than other states, under some political leaders rather than others, in some historical and cultural contexts rather than others, and so on? This differs from still a third question: How do we explain the origins of a particular war? Most international relations scholars (and particularly those in North America) focus primarily on the second question, explaining variations in war and peace. They leave the question of why war occurs at all to philosophers and biologists and leave the question of why a particular war occurs to historians. This is not to pass judgment on the relative importance of the three questions, only to say that they are different and that their investigation may require different theoretical orientations, different conceptions of causation and explanation, and different methodologies. One important exception to this focus on variations in war and peace is the argument by Waltz (1979) and other neorealists that the fundamental cause of war is the anarchic structure of the international system. Anarchy, defined as the absence of a legitimate governmental authority to regulate disputes and enforce agreements between states, “causes” war in the sense that there is no governmental enforcement mechanism in the international system to prevent wars.5 Although anarchy may provide one persuasive answer to the question of the permissive causes of war, it is generally treated as a structural constant and consequently it cannot account for variations in war and peace. Waltz (1988, p. 620) seems to concede this point and argues, “Although neorealist theory does not explain why particular wars are fought, it does explain war’s dismal recurrence through the millennia.” Other neorealists also recognize this limitation and have begun to incorporate other variables, including the polarity of the system and the offensive/defensive balance, in order to explain variations of war and peace in anarchic systems. Another exception to the focus on variations in war and peace can be found in some feminist theorizing about the outbreak of war, although most feminist work on war focuses on the consequences of war, particularly for women, rather than on the outbreak of war (Elshtain 1987, Enloe 1990, Peterson 1992, Tickner 1992, Sylvester 1994). The argument is that the gendered nature of states, cultures, and the world system contributes to the persistence of war in world politics. This might provide an alternative (or supplement) to anarchy as an answer to the first question of why violence and war repeatedly occur in international politics, although the fact that peace is more common than war makes it difficult to argue that patriarchy (or anarchy) causes war. Theories of patriarchy might also help answer the second question of variations in war and peace, if they identified differences in the patriarchal structures and gender relations in different international and domestic political systems in different historical contexts, and if they incorporated these differences into empirically testable hypotheses about the outbreak of war. This is a promising research agenda, and one that has engaged some anthropologists. Most current feminist thinking in political science about the outbreak of war, however, treats gendered systems and patriarchal structures in the same way that neorealists treat anarchy, as a constant.and consequently it cannot explain variations in war and peace. The Levels-of-Analysis Framework Ever since Waltz (1959) classified the causes of war in terms of their origins in the individual, the nation-state, and the international system (which he labeled first-, second-, and third-image explanations, respectively), international relations theorists have agreed on the utility of the levels-of-analysis framework as an organizing device for the study of war and international behavior more generally. Some scholars have modified Waltz’s framework by collapsing the individual and nation-state levels to create a simplified dichotomy of nation (or unit) level and system level (Singer 1961, Waltz 1979), while others have disaggregated the nation-state level into distinct governmental and societal-level factors (Jervis 1976, Rosenau 1980), a practice that I follow here. Following Waltz (1959), most scholars use the levels of analysis as a framework for classifying independent variables. This leads to such questions as whether the causes of war derive primarily from the level of the international system, national societies or bureaucracies, or individual decision-makers. Although the question of which level is most important has stimulated useful debate, until recently it distracted attention from the equally important issue of how variables from different levels interact in the foreign policy process. The levels-of-analysis concept is sometimes used differently, to refer to the dependent variable, or to the type of entity whose behavior is to be explained. In this sense the systemic level of analysis refers to explanations of patterns and outcomes in the international system; the dyadic level refers to explanations of the strategic interactions between two states; the national level refers to explanations of state foreign policy behavior; the organizational level refers to explanations of the behavior of organizations; and the individual level refers to explanations of the preferences, beliefs, or choices of individuals. The failure of scholars to be explicit about exactly how they are using the levels-of-analysis concept is a source of confusion in the field. Some have erroneously interpreted Singer.s (1961, p. 92) comment that the various levels “defy theoretical integration...[and] are not immediately combinable” to suggest that analysts should not combine variables from different levels of analysis to explain foreign policy decisions or international outcomes. But Singer.s statement makes sense only if the levels of analysis are conceptualized in terms of the dependent variable. This is the familiar micro-macro problem of aggregation across levels. We cannot assume that correlations or causal connections at one level of analysis are necessarily valid at another level. It is conceivable, for example, that concentrations of power may promote peace at the dyadic level but war at the system level. This has important implications for theories of war and peace. Although it is possible that individual- or national-level variables could be the primary causes of war, these variables do not constitute a logically complete explanation because they do not explain how individual beliefs and preferences are translated into state decisions and actions or how the strategies or behaviors of states interact to lead to war as a dyadic or systemic outcome. To the extent that most wars involve the mutual and interactive decisions of two or more adversaries, an explanation for the outbreak of war logically requires the inclusion of dyadic- or systemic-level variables. This does not necessarily mean, however, that these variables are the most important in terms of amount of variation explained. The levels-of-analysis framework is not the only way to organize the literature on the causes of war or on international politics more generally. It has long been fashionable for international relations theorists to frame debates in terms of the so-called paradigm wars between realism and liberalism (Baldwin 1993). In contrast to the realist focus on the struggle for power and security in an anarchic and conflictual Hobbesian world, the liberal tradition sees a more benign Grotian international society or Lockean state of nature where anarchy does not imply disorder. States have common as well as conflictual interests, aim to maximize economic welfare as well as provide for security, and create international institutions that help regulate conflict and promote cooperation (Keohane 1989). Although the paradigmatic debate between realism and liberalism has imposed some order on a chaotic field, it distracts attention from significant variations within each paradigm, variations that often lead to conflicting hypotheses. It also detracts from the important task of systematically integrating key components from each approach into a more complete and powerful theory. Furthermore, the “paradigm wars” ignore important hypotheses associated with the Marxist-Leninist tradition and saddle liberalism with charges of the neglect of power that are better associated with the utopianism of Thomas Paine and others (Walker 1998). As a field, international relations needs to shift its attention from the level of paradigms to the level of theories, focus on constructing theories and testing them against the empirical evidence, and leave the question of whether a particular approach fits into a liberal or realist framework to the intellectual historians. THEORIES OF THE CAUSES OF WAR Systemic-Level Theories The realist tradition has dominated the study of war since Thucydides, and includes Machiavellians, Hobbesians, classical balance of power theorists, Waltzian neorealists, and hegemonic transition theorists.6 Although different realist theories often generate conflicting predictions, they share a core of common assumptions: The key actors in world politics are sovereign states that act rationally to advance their security, power, and wealth in a conflictual international system that lacks a legitimate governmental authority to regulate conflicts or enforce agreements. For realists, wars can occur not only because some states prefer war to peace, but also because of unintended consequences of actions by those who prefer peace to war and are more interested in preserving their position than in enhancing it.7 Even defensively motivated efforts by states to provide for their own security through armaments, alliances, and deterrent threats are often perceived as threatening and lead to counteractions and conflict spirals that are difficult to reverse. This is the “security dilemma,” the possibility that a state’s actions to provide for its security may result in a decrease in the security of all states, including itself (Jervis 1978). Realists do not assume that international relations are always conflictual, and they have recently focused on the question of the conditions for cooperation under anarchy, often through the use of iterated Prisoner.s Dilemma models (Jervis 1978, Axelrod 1984, Grieco 1990). The iterated models are more appropriate for most situations than single-play Prisoner.s Dilemma models, and the iterated Prisoner.s Dilemma framework has generated some useful hypotheses regarding the rather restrictive conditions under which cooperation is likely. The assumption that the same game is repeated over and over is often problematic, however, particularly for security issues, because one play of the game (preemption, for example) can significantly change power relationships and affect payoffs in the next iteration. Nor is it clear that unilateral defection is always preferred to mutual cooperation; stag hunt models, in which mutual cooperation is both sides. first preference, may be more applicable in many situations (e.g. where each side fears both war and preemption by the other). There has been a tendency to apply Prisoner.s Dilemma models to many situations in which the assumptions of the model are not satisfied. The core proposition of realist theory is that the distribution of power, throughout the system or within a dyad, is the primary factor shaping international outcomes. But different versions of realist theory generate different, sometimes contradictory explanations and predictions of foreign policy choices and international outcomes, based on different assumptions about the motivations of states, the nature of power, and the identity and boundaries of the system. Given the variety of realist propositions and predictions, it is possible to interpret nearly any foreign policy behavior or international outcome as consistent with some version of realism. This is not particularly helpful, for if theories are not falsifiable they have little explanatory power. We should treat realism as a paradigm rather than as a theory, and focus instead on specific theories that generate more determinant, testable propositions. The key division in the realist literature on war is not the standard one between classical realism and neorealism8, but rather between balance of power theory and hegemonic theory. Balance of power theory includes numerous variations on the classical realism of Morgenthau (1967) and the more systemic structural realism of Waltz. Hegemonic theory is a structural theory that incorporates power transition theory and hegemonic stability theory and that downplays the importance of anarchy. Balance of power theory posits the avoidance of hegemony as the primary goal of states and the maintenance of an equilibrium of power in the system as the primary instrumental goal. The theory predicts that states, and particularly great powers, will balance against those states that constitute the primary threats to their interests and particularly against any state that threatens to secure a hegemonic position.9 Balance of power theorists argue that the balancing mechanism.which includes both external alliances and internal military buildups.almost always successfully avoids hegemony, either because potential hegemons are deterred by their anticipation of a military coalition forming against them or because they are defeated in war after deterrence fails. In balance of power theory, serious threats of hegemony are a sufficient condition for the formation of a blocking coalition, which leads either to the withdrawal of the threatening power or to a hegemonic war. Balance of power theory is more concerned with explaining national strategies, the formation of blocking coalitions, the avoidance of hegemony, and the stability of the system than the origins of wars, which are underdetermined. All balance of power theorists agree that some form of equilibrium of military capabilities increases the stability of the system (generally defined as the relative absence of major wars), and that movements toward unipolarity are destabilizing because they trigger blocking coalitions and (usually) a hegemonic war to restore equilibrium. There is a major debate, however, between classical realists, who argue that stability is further supported by the presence of a multipolar distribution of power and a .flexible. alliance system (Morgenthau 1967, Gulick 1955), and neorealists, who argue that bipolarity is more stable than multipolarity (Waltz 1979, Mearsheimer 1990). Although neorealists rely heavily on polarity as a key explanatory variable, they do so with very little supporting evidence. They overgeneralize from the Cold War experience, where bipolarity is confounded with the existence of nuclear weapons and other key variables, and fail to demonstrate the validity of their arguments with respect to earlier historical eras. Although bipolarity is less common than multipolarity, it has occurred before, as illustrated by the Athens-Sparta rivalry in the fifth century BC and the Habsburg-Valois rivalry in the early sixteenth century, both of which witnessed numerous wars. Neorealists also ignore a number of quantitative studies that suggest that bipolarity is no less war-prone than multipolarity, that wars occur under a variety of structural conditions, and that polarity is not a primary causal factor in the outbreak of war (Sabrosky 1985). An important alternative to balance of power theory is power transition theory, a form of hegemonic theory that shares realist assumptions but emphasizes the existence of order within a hierarchical system (Organski & Kugler 1980, Gilpin 1981, Thompson 1988). Hegemons commonly arise and use their strength to create a set of political and economic structures and norms of behavior that enhance the stability of the system while advancing their own security. Differential rates of growth, the costs of imperial overextension, and the development of vested domestic interests lead to the rise and fall of hegemons, and the probability of a major war is greatest at the point when the declining leader is being overtaken by the rising challenger. Either the challenger initiates a war to bring its benefits from the system into line with its rising military power or the declining leader initiates a “preventive war” to block the rising challenger while the chance is still available (Levy 1989b, pp. 253.54). The resulting hegemonic war usually generates a new hegemonic power, and the irregular hegemonic cycle begins anew. Power transition theorists disagree somewhat on the precise identity of hegemonic wars and the particular causal dynamics from which they arise; for comparisons of the wars and critiques of the theories see Levy (1985) and Vasquez (1993). Although many of the theoretical analyses of power transition theory focus on transitions between the dominant state in the system and a challenger, and include conceptions of a broader international system and hierarchy, some applications of power transition theory are dyadic in nature and apply in principle to any two states in the system. The dyadic-level “power preponderance” hypothesis, which holds that war is least likely when one state has a preponderance of power over another and is most likely when there is an equality of power, has received widespread support in the empirical literature (Kugler & Lemke 1996).

In 2014, Sweden became the first country to establish a “feminist” foreign policy framework.163 It was followed by Canada in 2017,164 and Mexico, the most recent adoptee, in 2020.165 As a new frontier in the gender-and-national security (or “gendering national security”) journey, these feminist foreign policies demand examination.

In articulating the contributions women make to peacebuilding — or how a women-focused policy agenda will lead to less aggressive, militarized, or oppressive and exclusionary outcomes — both the Canadian and Scandinavian frameworks are undergirded by the enduring narrative of women as inherently peaceful, conciliatory, and exclusively community-oriented. This implies that women’s interests are uniform, and consistent with the “common good.” The feminist agendas are largely concerned with traditional interventions in women’s lived experiences: sexual and gender-based violence, reproductive and maternal health, education, and so forth. Seeking to address challenges in these areas is an admirable, necessary goal. However, there is not just a conceptual glass ceiling governing our understanding of a woman’s place in policy and the place of women’s issues on the national security agenda. Rather, the endeavor itself resembles a glass doll house — a prettier rendering of the pink ghettos that maintains much of the same intellectual architecture of previous, failed approaches to gender-informed policymaking.

It appears to have a very clear message and poured a bucket of very cold water over second wave feminists’ enthusiasm for trying to use law for women.70 This has led to a disjuncture between feminist theorising and practice, which is regretted by many feminists.71 It is my disquiet about this call to turn away from law, and the belief that legal feminists, both scholars and activists, have a responsibility to engage with law that underpins the thesis. Critique of law is insufficient. There is a need to use law’s tools in traditional and imaginative ways not only to expose its gendered character but to find new ways of doing law.

This aligns the thesis alongside feminists who seek to reconstruct liberal values rather than reject them outright.72 Feminists have interrogated liberalism and found it wanting. They have critiqued the individualistic and autonomous nature of the liberal subject, the dualism that liberalism presents in its divisions between the rational versus the emotional, its formal view of equality, the vision of the neutral state and its separation of the public and the private realm. 73 Jaggar concludes that feminism has often relied on liberal ideas and has many reasons to be grateful to liberalism, but that it is incapable of bringing about the changes desired.74 Nussbaum, on the contrary, accepts much of the critique of liberalism, but she has famously mounted a spirited defence of its principles of ‘personhood, autonomy, rights dignity [and] self respect’.75 She has pointed out the diversity of liberal thinking, and notes that it has attempted to respond to feminist criticisms. She tries to persuade the reader that, ‘[t]he deepest and most central ideas of the liberal tradition are ideas of radical force and great theoretical and practical value’.76 Nussbaum’s own project, based on human capabilities, articulates a set of needs necessary for autonomy and human flourishing.77 My concern that Smart’s exhortations to desist from legal engagement, are overly dismissive of law’s possibilities, are shared by other legal feminists and critical theorists. Sandland criticizes Smart for creating a dichotomy between politics/philosophy and between deconstruction/reform thus closing down all political and legal options. 78 Being outside the system as a form of resistance is, according to Sandland, a strategy of ‘no resistance’. He sees Smart as being overly pessimistic, by dismissing the significance of cases such as R v R, where the judges removed the marital rape exemption, there is a danger of feminism ‘understating its own political and jurisprudential purchase as a subversive force interrupting the “unmodified” liberal paradigm’.79 Feminism needs to use the tension between recognition and denial of law to evaluate the merits of legal intervention on a case-by-case basis. Sandland sees there being value in finding the gaps in law that provide a space to struggle over law’s meaning.80Lacey appears sympathetic to Smart’s theoretical project, and to Smart’s insight that law’s belief that it is objective, true and impartial inflates its status so that it appear superior to other forms of knowledge. This makes it harmful to women.81 But she also has reservations about Smart’s political strategy and argues that it would be unfortunate to give up attempts at legal reform. She notes that it is unclear that other institutions such as the family, religion or politics are more susceptible to reconstruction than law.82 Writing just under ten years later Munro argues that feminism should not relinquish its attempts to reconstruct law. She is not uncritical of liberal values, but given law’s resistance to competing discourses she thinks there are pragmatic reasons for using law rather than remaining silenced by an oppositional stance.83

Summary This wide array of positivist gender/IR work offers three major sets of contributions and challenges to existing IR scholarship. First, this scholarship has provided positivist evidence shedding light on many of the theoretical and descriptive suppositions developed in nonpositivist gender/IR work. Furthermore, the positivist evidence has argued for the substantive as well as statistical significance of gender in explaining critically important phenomena. As noted, Hudson et al. (2012) propose that gender has a larger impact on conflict onset than economic development or democracy. Erik Melander (2005a) found that measures of gender equity have at least as much impact on civil war onset as factors such as economic development, democracy, and ethnic fractionalization. Gizelis (2009) found that improved gender equity, as measured by higher female life expectancy, increases the likelihood of the success of UN peacekeeping missions several fold. Some of the positivist work critiques the simple view that women are always more peaceful than men are, supporting the general feminist perspective that the effects of gender on behavior are sophisticated, especially because gender is cultural/social as well as biological. For example, the role of women in terrorist and insurgent groups varies widely, as women are sometimes combatants, even engaging in sexual assault. The effects of gender on public opinion are also complex. Contra some 1980s perspectives about the hypermasculinity of nuclear weapons, for example, there is some evidence that American women are not significantly less likely than American men to favor nuclear weapons use. Second, this positivist work has helped address some scholarly questions that nonpositivist scholars had identified as important and underexplored. At a very simple level, positivist data collection has helped shed more light on the monumental scope of gender-related violence, a set of behaviors that significantly negatively affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people who happen to be women (Hudson et al. 2012). Positivist work has helped describe and understand the effects of elements of the global economy on the lives of women. It has also helped improve our understanding of the role women play in the foreign policy process, especially female heads of state, cabinet members, and members of parliament. Third, positivist work has helped identify new questions related to gender and IR. Positivist work has explored the role gender plays in the formation of trade policy preferences, the different political roles of female as compared with male casualties, the international determinants of the spread of gender equity, and others. New Directions Positivist scholarship has not yet come close to answering all existing questions relating to gender and IR. Much work remains to be done. Perhaps the single most important priority is for scholars to be aware of making essentialist assumptions that the meaning and behavioral consequences of gender are constant across space and time. Some of the positivist gender/IR work assumes that gender has essentialist effects, using research designs that do not allow for the possibility of varying effects of gender across context. Future positivist gender/IR work would benefit from relaxing essentialist assumptions, developing ideas as to how the effects of gender might vary across contexts. For example, a female national leader emerging from a society with weaker gender equity norms might behave differently than a female national leader emerging from a society with stronger gender equity norms. Research already suggests that the consequences of gender vary drastically across insurgent and terrorist groups, a phenomenon that deserves greater attention.