Pacifism or Passing the Buck? Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy

Overview

Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College examines the conventional wisdom that domestic factors and strong antimilitarist norms have constrained Japan’s security policy since the country’s bitter defeat in World War II. She argues that despite such restraints, Japan “has transformed itself from a burned-out ruin to one of the world’s foremost military powers.” She considers the implications of this finding for realist and contructivist theories of state behavior in the international system.