Knowledge Bank

Donnelly presents a multidimensional framework of the elements of social and political structures that dispenses with anarchy – which he shows was in fact the norm in International Relations prior to the 1970s. Structural theory in International Relations has become largely a matter of elaborating "the effects of anarchy." Simple hunter-gatherer band societies, however, perfectly fit the Waltzian model of anarchic orders but do not experience security dilemmas or warfare, pursue relative gains, or practice self-help balancing. They thus demonstrate that anarchy is not, in any plausible sense of the term, an ordering principle and that "the effects of anarchy," where they exist, are not effects of anarchy – undermining mainstream structural international theory as it has been practiced for the past three decades.