War and Social-Property Regimes in Greco-Roman Antiquity. A Return to the Contributions of International Relations
Neorealism and the English School depict Greco-Roman antiquity as a permanent state of war following a logic of ‘balance of power’ analogous to the contemporary international system. For its part, constructivism emphasizes the practices of cooperation that regulated interactions between city-states rather than war itself. Through a comparative analysis of the different logics of territorial expansion developed in democratic Greece and the Roman Republic, this article offers an alternative conceptualization of the strategies of territorialization and accumulation that prevailed in Athens and Rome. Rooted in the tradition of historical sociology in international relations, this conceptualization highlights how military activities that complement capabilities of production and appropriation can take varied forms and can be best understood by analyzing the historical specificity of different social regimes of property