Second Image

The second image is one of three "images" or levels of analysis introduced by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State, and War (1959) to organize explanations of international conflict. Where the first image attributes war to human nature and the third image attributes it to the anarchic structure of the international system, the second image locates causes inside the state itself: its regime type, political institutions, ideology, economic system, social cleavages, or ruling coalition.

Classic second-image arguments include the Kantian and later democratic peace claim that liberal democracies rarely fight one another; Marxist–Leninist theories holding that capitalist economic structures drive imperialism and war; and republican arguments that absolutist or militarist regimes are inherently more bellicose. More recent second-image work includes Jack Snyder's analysis of cartelized domestic coalitions in Myths of Empire (1991) and Etel Solingen's research on domestic political economy and regional orders.

In Waltz's own assessment the second image is insufficient on its own: changing the internal character of states (for example, making them all democracies or all socialist republics) does not, in his view, eliminate the structural pressures that produce recurrent war. He used this critique to motivate his later structural realism in Theory of International Politics (1979), which privileges the third image.

For Model UN delegates and IR students, the second image is a useful analytical move when a question asks why a particular state behaves as it does, rather than why the system as a whole produces certain patterns. Typical second-image variables include:

• regime type (democracy, autocracy, hybrid)
• domestic interest groups and lobbies
• bureaucratic and military institutions
• nationalism and political ideology
• economic structure and trade dependence

It is often paired or contrasted with first- and third-image explanations in essays and position papers to show analytical range.