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The Forest and the King of Beasts: Hierarchy and Opposition in Ancient India (c. 600–232 BCE)
In: The Balance of Power in World History, p. 99-121
In Search of Monsters: Realism and Progress in International Relations Theory after September 11
In: Security studies, Volume 15, Issue 3, p. 496-528
ISSN: 1556-1852
In search of monsters: realism and progress in international relations theory after September 11
In: Security studies, Volume 15, Issue 3, p. 496-528
ISSN: 0963-6412
World Affairs Online
Testing balance-of-power theory in world history
In: European journal of international relations, Volume 13, Issue 2, p. 155-185
ISSN: 1354-0661
World Affairs Online
The Comedy of Errors? A Reply to Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni
In: European journal of international relations, Volume 15, Issue 2, p. 381-388
ISSN: 1460-3713
In her response to our article, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni replaces balance-of-power theory (threat of hegemony begets balancing, which produces a tendency of international systems toward equilibria of power) with a complex congeries of competing and contingent conjectures about when states might balance. While these are certainly part of the extensive literature on the balance of power, lumping them together and calling them a `theory' invites a comedy of errors rather than an empirical test. The `ado' in our article was a novel empirical test of a theory that has been central to centuries of IR theorizing. As our review of the evidence confirms, this theory can indeed be evaluated in ancient and non-European international systems, and it is wrong: international systems do not tend toward equilibria of power, and balancing is relatively unimportant in explaining the equilibria that do occur. We end up agreeing with the gist of Sangiovanni's response: there is no empirically valid systemic balance-of-power theory, and it is time to turn to contingent middle-range hypotheses about balancing behavior.