POLI 381 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, Offensive Realism
7 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
Security can be a very complex and messy concept to work with. If we expand it to the realm of human security, we feed in all sorts of issues that strategic studies people ignore. Security sounds really nice, that everyone should be secure, but it doesn"t work that way. Becoming secure in one area may reduce your security in another area. Additionally, making one person more secure may make another person less secure. We shouldn"t assume that security isn"t a single, always good, thing. If we start off with the broad notion of human security, we can see that people tend to try to narrow it down. Individual security, state or society security, international/global security. Realists tend to focus on state/society security, particularly military/strategy security. The textbook talks briefly about neo-realism and neo-liberal institutionalism. These two positions date from the 1970s and 1980s, in that sense they are still old, but they do differ despite apparent similarities.
