Strategic is what we make of it

In the 1990s, an American scholar wrote a famous paper called Anarchy is what states make of it. The central argument was that little in international politics is pre-ordained and how we think about issues defines how we respond to them. A long line of thinkers from Thomas Hobbes in 1651 to Kenneth Waltz over 300 years later had argued that international politics was defined by anarchy. As a natural and inevitable result states had to act in a particularly realist way. But noted Alexander Wendt self-help and power politics do not follow either logically or causally from anarchy and that if today we find ourselves in a self-help world, this is due to process, not structure