Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1978 (5^th ed.)), esp. pp. 4-15 (‘Six Principles of Political Realism’)

Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979)

John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001)

Charles L. Glaser, Rational Theory of International Politics: The Logic of Competition and Cooperation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Nuno P. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)

Patrick Porter, The Global Village Myth: Distance, War, and the Limits of Power (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015)

Keir A. Lieber, War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics over Technology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Robert Jervis, ‘Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma’, World Politics 30:2 (January 1978), pp. 167-214.

Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989)

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Penguin, 2000 (431 B.C.))

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (London: Penguin, 2003 [1532])

Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001 [1939])

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1651])