The security dilemma revisited

Robert Jervis's article ''Cooperation under the Security Dilemma'' is among the most important in international relations in the past few decades. Nevertheless, relatively little effort has been devoted to examining its core logic, some of which which was left incomplete by Jervis. The most important gaps concern whether and how the security dilemma operates between rational actors. The first section of this article closes some of these gaps. The second section argues that two nonstructural variables-the extent of the adversary's greed and the extent of the adversary's unit-level knowledge of the state's motives-influence the magnitude of the security dilemma. The final section addresses basic criticisms of the security dilemma, including the empirical claim that greedy states are the key source of international conflict, that the security dilemma does not really exist, and that offense-defense theory is flawed. I conclude that only the greedy-states criticism poses a serious challenge.