Answer in about 150 words: What role does identity and technology play in the conceptualisation of Defensive realism? (2026, 10 Marks)
Defensive realism, the strand running from Kenneth N. Waltz‘s Theory of International Politics (1979) to Robert Jervis, Stephen Van Evera and Charles L. Glaser, holds that anarchy makes states security-seekers, not power-maximisers. Its claim that restraint is usually rational rests on two variables that bare structure cannot supply: technology, which sets the cost of attack, and identity, which shapes how states read one another’s intentions.
Technology: the offence–defence balance
- Jervis, in “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma” (1978), made the security dilemma a variable. When weapons and geography favour defence, conquest is costly and status quo states can afford restraint; when they favour offence, fear rises and even cautious states strike first.
- Distinguishability matters as much: if defensive arms differ visibly from offensive ones, a state can signal benign intent through its arsenal.
- Van Evera‘s cult of the offensive (1984) showed that European militaries in 1914 believed attack was easy when machine guns and railways favoured the defender. Perceived technology, not technology itself, drove the war.
- Nuclear weapons are the strongest case: a secure second strike makes conquest of a nuclear state irrational. India’s 2003 nuclear doctrine of credible minimum deterrence and no-first-use, long argued for by K. Subrahmanyam, applies exactly this logic.
Identity: perception, motives and type
- Jervis‘s Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976) showed that leaders read capabilities through prior beliefs.
- Stephen M. Walt‘s balance of threat adds perceived intentions to power. Glaser‘s Rational Theory of International Politics (2010) makes a rival’s type, greedy or security-seeking, the information that decides between arming and cooperating.
- Jack Snyder‘s Myths of Empire (1991) traces over-expansion to domestic coalitions whose self-image distorts strategy.
- Constructivists press further. Ted Hopf (1998) argued that a weapon’s meaning depends on whether its holder is friend or enemy, and Alexander Wendt that 500 British nuclear weapons worry Washington less than five North Korean ones.
Limits
- Keir A. Lieber (2000) argued that the balance cannot be measured well enough to predict anything.
- Cheap drones blur attack and defence: Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb (1 June 2025) hit Russian strategic bombers deep inside Russia, and drones featured in Operation Sindoor (May 2025).
Conclusion
Technology gives defensive realism its material variable and identity its perceptual one; together they explain why the same anarchy yields both restraint and spirals. The price is parsimony, since identity pulls the theory towards neoclassical realism and constructivism.