History
A great deal of IR displays little interest in history, for history is unimportant if the defining
feature of the international order is considered to be the transhistorical fact of ‘anarchy’.
Kenneth Waltz writes that ‘the enduring anarchic character of international politics
accounts for the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia’.2
Waltz recognises that there have been differing international systems in the course of the