Robert C. Johansen is notable for his long and productive career in the fields of global governance, peace studies, and human rights, and as a successful institution builder at the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Where the Evidence Leads is especially significant for its distinctive method of integrating normative and empirical theory bearing on questions of peace and human security.

His approach unfolds in a running dialogue between two sharply contrasting notions of “realism.” The first, which he calls “political realism,” is a set of Hobbesian ideas that are held by the most grim, zero-sum, realist scholars of international politics, and in Johansen’s account, by the foreign policy elites of powerful states, including the United States. The second is his own approach, which he calls “empirical realism.” This approach mounts an empirical critique of the results of actually existing foreign policy behavior, which Johansen argues are disastrous compared to the achievable results that would hypothetically follow from the adoption of policies that recognize the declining utility of war, the counterproductive consequences of narrowly conceived nationalism, and the potential benefits of an expanded role for cosmopolitan international law.

“Five factors differentiate empirical realism from political realism and the prevailing practices of the US policymaking community,” he says (p. 54). Whereas political realism reifies the state and the anarchical international system, empirical realism sees them as human creations that can evolve into a cooperative international society. Johansen says “state conduct is influenced by the international system of relative anarchy, lacking a central authority over member states, but it is not totally determined by it” (p. 55). According to his empirical realist approach, the internal conditions of states as well as their ideas, customs, law, institutions, ethics, culture, and religion affect state behavior. He stresses the “importance of looking at the good of the whole rather than the good of the parts, particularly of ‘my’ part.” Eliding the “is” and the “ought,” empirical realism proposes that “perspectives should move from primarily nation-state centric to increasingly global-centric” (p. 56).

He asks, “is empirical realism simply too idealistic?” (p. 71). “Is human nature too ‘self-interested’?” (p. 72). His answer to both questions is an unequivocal no: empirical realism is based on a factual critique of the current global disorder and a historically grounded view of the potential to replace it with a system that works better. In several example-filled chapters, he chronicles the march of folly whereby political realist policy makers are “misaligning military power and security” (p. 74), needlessly exacerbating poverty, despoiling the global environment, and failing to follow the salutary requirements of international law (pp. 75–223). These outcomes have been caused by a “structural breakdown” of systems of international cooperation, he says, producing a tragedy of the commons and failures of reciprocity (p. 121). In his view, a realistic opportunity for fundamental change was missed at the end of the Cold War, because state elites are political realists (p. 139). But the worthy, partially effective, past efforts to build transnational community and institutions for global cooperation show that creating a more functional global system is not a pipe dream (pp. 145–46). This fact-guided counterfactual reasoning constitutes the empirical part of empirical realism. However, even people who are generally sympathetic to this point of view may find that Johansen has left unspecified many crucial details that would be required to make his vision operational.

Johansen rests his argument on Alexander Wendt’s claim that the militarization of international politics is rooted not in the structural fact of anarchy per se, but in a Hobbesian culture of anarchy. Johansen says that this shows that Hobbesian fears reside in our minds and our habits, and so can be changed (p. 55). Wendt’s view, however, is that culturally engrained patterns can be just as hard to change as material constraints (Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 1999, p. 137).

Johansen also argues that cultural evolution producing “non-zero-sum” change requires ever larger units of political organization: specifically, “a new global democratic leviathan is needed” (p. 147). But how could this be made possible in the counterfactual world of empirical realism?

One stumbling block is the nationalism of sovereign states. Johansen acknowledges that actually existing democratic states are based on national self-determination, and elections for national governments would still be part of his new global order under the principle of “subsidiarity” (pp. 214–17). He says that their nationalism can promote cooperation by fostering in-group solidarity, though it also hinders cooperation through “us-versus-them” thinking, so it is necessary to “cosmopolitanize” nationalism (pp. 34–35, 66–69). He favors transnational social movements to play such a role (p. 329).

Even more problematic is how a cosmopolitan global leviathan could be democratic. Johansen envisions an ambitious project that would “build democratic global governance to enable formation and enforcement of laws essential for human security.” For this, Johansen has in mind the step-by-step evolution of a “web-like, more highly institutionalized balance-of-power system made up of legal, political, economic, and environmental balances, tempered by prudential checks on the most powerful actors in the system,” supported by “a broad transnational coalition” of “human rights organizations and other civil society groups, religious communities, far-sighted corporations, visionary political parties, municipal governments, progressive national governments, United Nations agencies, and other international organizations” (p. 347). This system seems notionally “democratic” in only the same sense as the present “liberal international order,” not in the literal sense of one person, one vote. Moreover, this democratic leviathan would begin as a coalition of the willing, with authoritarian “foot-draggers” sometimes left out.

How likely is it that this rather ramshackle order wouldn’t turn out to be just as dysfunctional as past international liberal orders? Johansen says domestic politics within states affect their foreign behavior, but wouldn’t “domestic politics” likewise complicate policy making inside the “global democratic leviathan”? How exactly would this system solve the collective-action dilemmas and distributional conflicts that have stymied action against global climate change so far? Why would the armed humanitarian interventions that Johansen foresees in the transformed order not lead to forever wars, replicating the very follies that he criticizes (pp. 178–79)?

Methodologically, Johansen’s book provides an occasion to revisit one of the most important but difficult problems in social science: how to integrate empirical and normative issues in a research design. He offers a distinctive approach to this methodological problem; others tackle it differently.

One tried-and-true way is to rely on normative theory to stipulate goals (say, democracy is good), then develop and test an empirical theory to guide choice of means (say, how can democracy be caused in given circumstances). Sometimes the normative objective in this approach can be reduced to a presumedly uncontroversial goal, with all the real work going into the empirical, causal analysis. Normative political theorists tend to reverse this division of labor, expending most of their conceptual work on establishing that, say, democracy is indeed a normative good, while engaging in light empirics used as suggestive illustrations or stating empirical scope conditions for the normative argument.

In another approach, some social constructivists treat norms as social facts to be observed, measured, and explained in a research program that seeks to establish the causes or consequences of norms, such as the norm of reciprocity or the nuclear taboo. Yet another way of integrating empirical and normative theory is known as moral realism, which may, for example, posit that practices that pragmatically solve social cooperation dilemmas take on a normative character as defining how good group members ought to behave.

Johansen’s “empirical realism” adds critical counterfactuals to this set of methodological approaches for integrating facts and norms. His counterfactual is designed to show that if actors had adopted empirically better-suited ideas, norms, or cultural practices, they could have realistically achieved outcomes that would have been better for almost everyone by most reasonable criteria. I take this to be a kind of functional theory of norms (p. 152).

Setting aside the confounding issue of possible hindsight bias, this evaluative process seems like a reasonable part of almost any attempt to learn from experience in situations where empirical conditions and normative assumptions come into play. One danger, however, is that the counterfactual may be constructed with reference to a list of ideal-type attributes, such as assuming without specifying a detailed mechanism that all the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have somehow become operational. In this way, the real gets critiqued against a standard set by the ideal. In other words, if Rwanda had been Denmark, it would not have had a genocide, and both Hutu and Tutsi would have been better off.

One of the key roles for normative idealism in international affairs and human rights has been its role as an aspirational direction-finding compass for pragmatic political strategy. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, was originally understood as a statement of aspirational goals, not as a list of binding commitments. Over time, many of these provisions have been more precisely defined and codified in treaties that many courts and national bureaucracies consider to have binding legal force. Although the UDHR often remains honored in the breach even after further codification, it establishes criteria for distinguishing a directionless, Machiavellian, purely transactional form of realism from a reform-minded, tactically astute, empirically grounded realism. Johansen’s book is valuable in that aspirational role and in pointing toward a research agenda on workable tactics to achieve those aspirations.