Revolution, war, and offensive realism.

摘要

Most studies of revolutionary wars have focused on the role played by ideology or threat perception to explain the prevalence of such conflicts. I instead argue that the occurrence or non-occurrence of these wars can best be explained using an offensive realist approach. Revolutions sometimes appear to other countries to temporarily reduce the power of the revolutionary state, while not convincing the revolutionaries that their country is weak. As a result, when the other countries try to take advantage of that weakness, the revolutionaries refuse to give in to their demands, a refusal which leads to war. Because the revolutionary state is stronger than it appears, these wars generally go poorly for the attackers, who soon find themselves on the defensive. The success of the revolutionary state alarms other powers, which balance against it, leading to stalemate and ultimately, to peace. This model of revolutionary conflict is first argued for theoretically and then compared to the historical record in case studies of the French, Russian, and Iranian Revolutions. In each of these cases, a war is examined and contrasted with another similar, crisis in which war did not ensue because there was not a disagreement about relative power. Finally, the lessons learned from these case studies are discussed, as well as the implications of this research for the structural realist paradigm as a whole.