Realist theory is especially relevant to the non-western world.

Neoclassical realism and global IR This reading of the global IR literature raises the following questions: Can realists address and contribute, from within their paradigm, to the intellectual debate around the discipline’s Western centrism? Can realist theorizing and analysis benefit from this? If so, how and through what avenues?

Some global IR scholars have observed that new realist variants such as NCR have become “more relevant to the non-Western world” because they draw insights from it (Acharya, 2014: 650). As such, realist insights continue to matter for the study of international relations (Schmidt, 2014: 468). Through colonialism as well as through globalization, sustained interaction, and associated processes of (forced and voluntary) socialization, similar patterns of state behavior have spread across the globe. There is then, at a basic conceptual level, a case to be made for the continued inquiry into notions such as power, anarchy, and balance of power from a realist perspective. How realists describe patterns of state behavior originated in a Western canon, but these patterns are not exclusively Western anymore (Schmidt, 2014: 468).

Realism provides appropriate and generalizable first-cut theories into dynamics of global international relations, because concepts such as anarchy matter beyond the West. The experience of anarchy is shared across the globe in the contemporary system of states, if to differing degrees (see also: Acharya and Buzan, 2007: 288, 293; 2019: 303; Waltz, 1979). Anarchy is here understood as the absence of a “higher ruling body in the international system” (Mearsheimer, 2003/2014: 30). If the system of states is structured by anarchy and characterized by power and uncertainty regarding other states’ behavior, it provides states’ principal interest in survival and welfare. Of course, states differ in their capabilities and some states may be unable to “at any time use force” (Waltz, 1954/2001: 160). And yet, neoclassical realists argue that the anarchical environment is less strictly determinative than neorealism suggests: it provides leeway even for smaller states to enact policy independently. The experience of anarchy is also modified by system-level factors, and differently for differently placed states. For example, geographic location, new military technology, and the presence and absence of regional alliances influence the way the international environment affects state behavior (Ripsman et al., 2016; Snyder, 1996). Finally, the experience of anarchy is mediated through domestic intervening variables such as decision-makers’ perceptions, domestic lobby groups, and resource extractive capacity (Dueck, 2009: 139; Taliaferro, 2006).

When neoclassical realists complement neorealist concepts such as anarchy with domestic intervening variables, they borrow from a tradition that analyzes domestic variables to explain the production of foreign policy, grand strategy, and international relations. Earlier authors analyze, for example, decision-making dynamics, resource extractive capacity, and policy preferences of domestic socioeconomic groups (Frieden and Rogowksi, 1996; Gourevitch, 1986; Gowa, 1983; Haskel, 1980; Krasner, 1977). Some authors writing in this tradition have long interrogated non-Western cases. For example, Skocpol argues that former colonial relationships insufficiently explain why intrastate social revolutions occur (Skocpol, 1979). Domestic variables are also employed in classical realism. Classical realists write that state behavior is affected by domestic politics and public support (Carr, 1939/2001: 85–87, 132–145), history and ideology (Kirshner, 2012), domestic institutions’ legitimacy (Niebuhr, 1959: 49–66), decision-makers’ ability to mobilize resources (Aron, 1966/2009: 52–57), or the quality of diplomatic staff (Morgenthau, 1948/1993: 155–158).

NCR differs from this tradition in its paradigmatic assumptions and therefore in its causal mechanism. NCR prioritizes changes in the systemic distribution of relative material capabilities to explain state behavior. It then considers intervening variables to explain anomalous foreign policy, grand strategy, or macro-patterns of behavior. In so doing, neoclassical realists “explain political behavior that a sparer structural realist theory cannot” (Ripsman et al., 2016: 114). Further, unlike some earlier domestic politics approaches, NCR has largely ignored global IR. NCR has also, as elaborated below, mostly been developed as an American (and increasingly also European) body of knowledge.

And yet, NCR may anticipate three potential flaws of non-Western theorizing. If non-Western scholarship is perceived and perceives itself as local, decentered knowledge, it risks becoming trapped in an exceptionalist account of international relations. Such an account limits itself to ideas and orientations unique to particular non-Western states (Biersteker, 2009: 311; Hurrell, 2016: 6; Shahi, 2019a: 251). Certainly, there is ample reason to scope theoretical and empirical research around a particular non-Western state; in fact, such research may appropriately counteract IR’s “fetishization of abstraction” (Krishna, 2001: 401). However, when scholars scope their research around a particular state, they may overlook potential for comparison and generalization, and even risk losing the critical distance to local practice and power necessary for good scholarship. This in turn reifies difference within the cases between carefully collected and contextualized evidence on the one side positioned against a one-dimensional view of the West or Western theory on the other. It essentializes Western as well as non-Western IR and hinders the development of global IR (Shahi, 2019a: 254). When we posit non-Western experiences and scholarship as valuable only where they differ from their Western equivalents, we reproduce the dichotomies that global IR challenges.

What allows NCR to address these potential shortcomings of non-Western theorizing is that it attempts to theorize progressively and bridge materialism and idealism as well as structure and agency (Brown, 2013: 488–489; Foulon, 2015; Sears, 2017; Zhang, 2017: 291). NCR offers a way to operationalize non-Western knowledge and scholars within a realist framework that places causal primacy in the material structure of the international environment. If global IR subsumes existing knowledge from realism, it can include patterns of geopolitical competition, security threats, and anarchic conditions. This allows scholars to retain some of the theoretical and methodological advantages of realism all the while they can explore contextual and local factors (Hurrell, 2016: 8).