Feb 21, 2022
This interview was recorded on Tuesday 15th February before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Professor John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has…
Feb 21, 2022
This interview was recorded on Tuesday 15th February before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Professor John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He has published six immensely influential books on international relations theory. In 2020, he won the James Madison Award, which is given once every three years by the American Political Science Association to “an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.”
What Prof.John Mearsheimer believes?
"More specifically, I am a realist, which means that I believe that the great powers dominate the international system and they constantly engage in security competition with each other, which sometimes leads to war."
What is Mearsheimer's theory of offensive realism?
Mearsheimer. … view, which he called “offensive realism,” holds that the need for security, and ultimately for survival, makes states aggressive power maximizers. States do not cooperate, except during temporary alliances, but constantly seek to diminish their competitors' power and to enhance their own.
R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science
Pick Hall 416
773 702 8667
[email protected]
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his PhD in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He has published six books: Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize and has been translated into nine different languages; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made the New York Times best seller list and has been translated into twenty-four different languages; Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (2011), which has been translated into twelve different languages; and The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018) which has been translated into five different languages.
