International Relations: It’s time to revise how we talk about revisionist powers
Historians and political scientists have traditionally divided countries into status quo and revisionist powers. The former tend to accept the existing international system as it is, while the latter reject the prevailing legitimacy of the international system and seek to alter it considerably or to overthrow it entirely. I would argue that there is a conceptual problem in ascribing the term revisionist to describe the respective foreign policy goals to international actors, such as Napoleonic France, modern Iran, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.