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Introduction
The solidity of the international status quo and concomitantly the strength of revisionism is a major concern to the theory of Realism because it purports to account for big questions of war and peace.1 By logical implication, the location, timing, and strength of challenges to the current world order should be a central issue to all Realists. It is odd, therefore, to observe that many contemporary Realists eschew these big and important issues: some simply assume that the problem is not there; others argue that the problem of revisionism is so prevalent that we are better off studying the status quo . We are, crudely speaking, dealing with Defensive Realists who assume that all states are status quo players (Waltz, 1979), and Offensive Realists who assume that all states are revisionists (Mearsheimer, 2001). These Realist perspectives essentially fail to elaborate on the sources of change , which were examined by Classical Realism, and which must be investigated if we are to understand the durability of the Western principles that won the Cold War and also the way in which powerful actors are likely to contest these principles. In short, Classical Realism contains conceptual tools that make it the most promising member of the Realist family. In this article, we outline how Realists should go about using these tools to understand change, and we identify questions that can inspire future Realist research on revisionism and the status quo .
We are in several ways suggesting that Realism must return to its roots. Classical Realism was premised on the belief that one must understand world politics qua the ambitions of the states inhabiting this realm. Classical Realism was thus international relations and foreign policy analysis integrated. Subsequently, and ultimately to the detriment of political understanding, we argue, Realists retreated into structural conceptions of world politics while their critics occupied the field of foreign policy analysis. Structural Realists would thus argue that all states are pushed to do certain things (though they disagree whether the push is defensive or offensive) while foreign policy analysts would argue that policy should be understood primarily as the outcome of bureaucratic politics and cognitive processes. The stage was thus set for an often acrimonious debate between Realists operating on the...