Introduction
During a 2024 US presidential debate, Republican Party nominee Donald Trump pledged that he would ensure ‘[o]ther countries … finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world’.Footnote 1 This agenda, which views subordinates as ‘free-riding’ at Washington’s expense and pushes for adjustments to US-led international hierarchies, again appeared during President Trump’s January 2025 inauguration speech, in which he singled out Panama as having treated the US ‘very badly’, and insisted that Washington would be ‘taking back’ the ‘foolish gift’ of the Panama Canal.Footnote 2 The US’ other proposed remedies for this alleged ‘freeloading’ range from tariffs, to dramatic increases in subordinates’ military spending, to requests for ‘cost plus 50 (per cent)’ payments for stationing the US military on their territory.Footnote 3
Some commentators have found these demands for the revision of US-dominated hierarchies uniquely shocking and self-destructive.Footnote 4 However, it is important to put changing US behaviour in historical perspective. Hegemons fearing their own decline have often blamed their subordinates. In the 1980s the Soviet Union’s Minister of Defence, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, reportedly ‘called on the East European governments to contribute more to the Warsaw Pact’s joint defence efforts’,Footnote 5 and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the British sought to outsource more of the burden of Imperial defence to their colonies.Footnote 6 From a theoretical standpoint, such allegations that subordinates are exploiting the hegemon not only invert the central claim of many critical scholars of international hierarchies – who see them as favouring the powerful – but also undermine liberal arguments that these relationships are mutually advantageous. Consequently, rather than asking if international hierarchies are fundamentally exploitative or mutually beneficial, it may be more helpful to ask when they are likely to function or be perceived in these contrasting ways.
In answering this question, we propose a tripartite model of rising, mature, and declining international hierarchies that we refer to as the ‘hierarchy life cycle’ – bridging critical and liberal understandings by drawing attention to how international hierarchies may shift between exploitative and cooperative modes of behaviour over time. Here we understand hierarchy creation and maintenance as deriving from some combination of two basic superordinate strategies: attaining a preponderance of fungible goods, and the provision of nonfungible goods to subordinates. Our cyclical model helps to bridge the divide between two different accounts of hierarchy. Liberal depictions of international hierarchies emphasize their Pareto-efficient mutual benefits, but risk overstating the stability of these hierarchies, and even go so far as to claim that international hierarchy and exploitation are antithetical; conversely, critical accounts view international hierarchies as fundamentally exploitative of subordinates, and thus may overestimate the likelihood and impact of resistance.Footnote 7
As Claudia Kim has noted, the scale of contemporary scholarly interest in international hierarchies means ‘it is no longer controversial to state that hierarchy and organized inequality, as opposed to anarchy and sovereign equality, shape much of state behavior across vast swathes of space and time’.Footnote 8 However, despite the established consensus that international hierarchies matter, there remains wide divergence on how hierarchy has been operationalized in International Theory. Zarakol has argued that demonstrating the existence of hierarchies is not enough; scholars need to better explain where they come from, how they interact, and how actors navigate them.Footnote 9 Similarly, Worth has complained that ‘hegemony’ is used in too many ways, especially the divide between statist and ideational conceptions, calling instead for ‘a wider, more nuanced model’.Footnote 10 In this way, the central contribution of our hierarchy life cycle model is in how it synthesizes existing approaches and bridges second-generation debates over international hierarchies – their material/social origins, durability, and propensity for exploitation/mutual benefits – by showing how many of these features are not intrinsic truths about all hierarchies but rather reflect specific moments in the historical process of creating and maintaining superordinate–subordinate relationships. This is useful because critical and liberal scholars have much to offer each other in developing more sophisticated understandings of the rise and fall of international hierarchies – as well as their transition from benign to malign institutions – but their accounts are usually treated as mutually exclusive. Our life cycle model argues that both logics can fit into a broader story of hierarchy formation.
The remainder of this article consists of three main sections. In the first, we review second-generation debates around the social or material nature of international hierarchies, their orientation towards mutual benefits or exploitation, and their durability. Liberal contract theorists, we argue, emphasize material mutual benefits and durability, while critical scholars hold varying material and social perspectives of exploitation. In the second section, we set out the hierarchy life cycle as a unifying model for understanding the rise and fall of international hierarchies. We argue that distinct combinations of fungible and nonfungible goods underwrite international hierarchies at each of the three stages of this cycle. Through vertical trade-offs, aspiring superordinates pool resources or cooperate with potential subordinates in the pursuit of long-term payoffs and path dependencies. In contrast, stable superordinates achieve legitimacy and authority through the provision of horizontal trade-offs with nonfungible goods otherwise difficult for their subordinates to attain; and, under pressure, insecure superordinates seek to re-verticalize their relationships to extract more concessions from their subordinates. The third section analyses policy documents, official government speeches, and the secondary literature to demonstrate this model at work through two case studies: Saudi Arabia’s aspiring and stable hierarchies over much of the Arabian Peninsula, and the contemporary challenge to the US’ longstanding hierarchies in Northeast Asia over Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Second-generation debates on international hierarchies
The first generation of post-Cold War debates about international hierarchies sought to demonstrate the existence and importance of hierarchical modes of behaviour in the ‘anarchic’ Westphalian system.Footnote 11 Our intervention is instead positioned at the nexus of second-generation debates, which are occurring along three overlapping spectrums: (i) whether international hierarchies are primarily material or social in origin; (ii) the durability of subordinate–superordinate relationships, and – most crucial for our purposes here – (iii) whether these relationships are exploitative or mutually beneficial.
These debates reflect deep differences among scholars on the nature of international hierarchies, even where they agree it exists. Liberal contract theorists see hierarchy as largely a benign process whereby a hegemon provides subordinates with public goods – such as security or access to a global trade system – in exchange for partial and consensual sovereignty sacrifices.Footnote 12 These contracts can be (re)negotiated, like any other contract, but typically the liberal literature emphasizes the durability of these ties because of their mutual benefits. From this perspective, hegemonic contracts are changed incrementally through ‘a complex process of renegotiating the consensus on values, rights, and duties’.Footnote 13 For scholars who view international hierarchies as extending into domestic political spaces through the intertwining of networks, the process of change may be slower and harder to trace because the networks that sustain a hierarchy may occur at the sub-national and ‘everyday’ level.Footnote 14 A materialist conception is also at the heart of some critical approaches, particularly with world-systems theorists, who see hierarchies as a system of unequal economic exchange between elites (core) and their subordinates (periphery).Footnote 15 These patterns can be difficult for actors in the periphery to undo due to path dependencies, structural inequalities, and the collaboration of periphery elites, but long-term historical changes can lead to the emergence of new core actors.Footnote 16 Some critical and realist approaches converge when they see hierarchy as dominance operating along various material dimensions. This can range from physical threats, such as the unprecedented hegemonic potential of space-based weaponry,Footnote 17 to international financial subordination, described as ‘a relation of domination, inferiority and subjugation between difference spaces across the world market, expressed in and through money and finance’.Footnote 18
Meanwhile, identity-focused conceptions are similarly split between positive and negative interpretations. Constructivist and English School approaches concede that material factors are a precondition for hegemony, but largely view hierarchy as a social contract whereby subordinates give status and legitimacy to their superordinate because they share or embody community values and identity.Footnote 19 In this way, Hobson and Sharman define hierarchy as a relationship ‘whereby one is entitled to command and the other is obligated to obey, and this relationship is recognized as right and legitimate by each’.Footnote 20 This literature is sometimes optimistic that consensual relationships can persist even if the material balance of power changes. For example, Joseon Korea persisted in acknowledging the centrality of the Ming Dynasty even after it had lost material dominance over Northeast Asia.Footnote 21 Farther along the spectrum, though, postcolonial and feminist scholars view social hierarchies as the product of racist and gendered norms or identities embedded in social relations that create subjectivities guiding everyday behaviour and are extremely difficult to change.Footnote 22 For critical scholars working in the tradition of Gramscian thought, these hierarchies are exploitative because they are actually based on manufactured or ‘organized’ consent.Footnote 23 In sum, even when they agree on what hierarchies are made of, i.e. materiality or ideas, liberal and critical accounts of hierarchy are starkly different, almost as if describing different worlds.
We argue that reconciling second-generation debates on the nature and durability of hierarchy is possible by ‘zooming out’ to examine the complete ‘life cycle’ of international hierarchies. While noting that a postpositivist reading would question the assumption that both traditions are looking at an underlying ‘truth’, bringing liberal and critical perspectives of hierarchy into an (uneasy) dialogue helps us see how different temporal contexts and orientations have produced rival but complementary understandings of hierarchy. Putting these snapshots together can produce a fuller understanding of the diversity of hierarchical processes.Footnote 24 By emphasizing historical change, our argument is broadly sympathetic to the English School’s perspective of international life as shifting between competitive and cooperative logics. Just as the English School’s account of international systems transforming into international societies bridges realist, liberal, and cosmopolitan accounts of international life by showing them to be stages or ‘traditions’Footnote 25 rather than an intrinsic condition, we contend that a similar sensitivity to the changing logics underlying hierarchical orders can help denaturalize them by showing that they too do not have a fixed meaning. Moreover, while we identify the importance of fungible and nonfungible objects in creating hierarchy, we eschew simple material determinism by acknowledging constructivist arguments that material things become especially powerful when imbued with social meanings.Footnote 26
In doing so, we suggest that critical and liberal contract approaches both identify key characteristics of hierarchies but appear incompatible only because they describe different stages of the cycle. Liberal contract approaches focus on the mutual benefits of hierarchical relationships because their model has been produced by investigating mature superordinates already at the ‘top’ of the cycle who possess many nonfungible goods to share. This benign vision of hierarchy not only includes accounts of US hegemony but also the historical Chinese ‘tributary system’.Footnote 27 Meanwhile, critical approaches are more focused on the behaviour of emerging superordinates, who are still trying to ascend to the top of the cycle, or the desperate and extractive actions of insecure superordinates trying to maintain their position. From these perspectives, superordination is largely produced by violence, trickery, and exploitation.Footnote 28 The core issue, we suggest, is the divergent temporal orientations of these approaches. Thus, liberal scholarship tends to take a moment of consensual hegemony in the present and extrapolate it into the past – such as favourable accounts of US hegemony – while critical scholarship tends to draw upon legacies of exploitation to critique the present. This is exemplified by Ikenberry, who views a consensual liberal hegemony, deeply rooted in US history, as ‘advanc[ing] the human condition’ and Vitalis, who describes Ikenberry’s scholarship as symptomatic of the masking of liberal hegemony’s deeply racist and Eurocentric structures.Footnote 29 In short, the scholarship on hierarchy sees a lot of individual trees at different stages of growth and decline but has not yet described the forest.
In the section that follows, we attempt to survey the ‘forest’ of hierarchy by presenting an ideal type model of how changing combinations of fungible and nonfungible goods contribute to shifts in superordinate–subordinate relationships, noting how each stage of the cycle tends to produce varying hierarchical logics that sometimes resemble liberal and at other times critical accounts of hierarchy. Although this is a tentative first step, our model unsettles existing accounts of hierarchies as natural facts with intrinsic qualities and seeks to show one possible means through which they can be integrated into a broader and non-exclusivist understanding of hierarchy as a process.
Fungible vs. nonfungible goods in international hierarchies.
Table 1 Long description
Fungible and nonfungible goods are categorized by whether they are non-material or material. Fungible non-material goods include ideas, values, and culture, while fungible material goods include soldiers, money, food, and land. Nonfungible non-material goods include reputation and a specific religion or ideology. Nonfungible material goods include strategic location, unique technology, skills, and rare goods or resources. Overall, fungible items are presented as broadly interchangeable across both intangible and tangible domains, whereas nonfungible items are defined by uniqueness or specificity in both domains. Examples are illustrative categories rather than an exhaustive list, and the table does not rank importance or frequency.
Fungibility and nonfungibility in the hierarchy life cycle
Fungibility is a legal and economic concept that refers to a ‘good that can be freely substituted by another of the same class’.Footnote 30 Often fungibility is viewed from the perspective of the spender, i.e. ‘how convertible is my good into other goods or services?’. This approach is exemplified by a deep vein of International Relations (IR) scholarship that uses the fungibility of money as an analogy to understand power.Footnote 31 However, fungibility can also be viewed from the perspective of the recipient, i.e. ‘how substitutable is the good being offered to me?’. This is more congruent with the original Latin usage of the term, which focused on the discharging of debts and obligations. In this context, ‘fungible’ meant that the lender did not need their original coins repaid but would be satisfied with any coins of the right value.Footnote 32 Conversely, ‘nonfungible’ goods were unique things with no substitutes, so the recipient would only be satisfied by that specific object. This means nonfungible goods operate differently from commodities because they create different kinds of obligations. Anthropological and archaeological literature distinguishes between fungible commodities and nonfungible prestige goods, noting how the latter are politically significant because they are designed to ‘appeal to others and attract people to the possessor of those objects’.Footnote 33 The differentiation created by the sharing and possession of irreplaceable objects and symbols helped fuel the first human hierarchies and remains integral to the way that hierarchies are created and sustained.Footnote 34
Building on this discussion, we propose a distinction between (i) fungible goods: material and nonmaterial assets that all polities in any given international system typically possess (even if in different quantities); and (ii) nonfungible goods: unique material or nonmaterial goods that are not easily replaceable (see Table 1). Both categories of goods can be used to create hierarchies, but they do so in different ways. As explored below, strategies focused on the accumulation of fungible goods are the simplest method of creating superordination, but the relationship is unstable and vulnerable to competition (Stage One). Facing these constraints, a successful superordinate can attempt to stabilize the relationship by converting their temporary advantage in fungible goods into nonfungible goods that make themselves irreplaceable to their subordinates (Stage Two). However, eventually the cost of sustaining these nonfungible goods can cause a superordinate to become more extractive towards its subordinates, breaking the social contract that underpinned the stability of their relationship (Stage Three). These oscillations constitute the hierarchy life cycle (see Figure 1).
The hierarchy life cycle in world politics.
Figure 1 Long description
Three stages of trade-off dynamics are illustrated. Stage 1, labeled ′Vertical Trade-Offs,′ describes how secondary states use equal resources to create dependencies and advantages in fungible goods. It mentions the risk of dependency and the potential for converting fungible advantages into nonfungible goods. Stage 2, ′Horizontal Trade-Offs,′ shows the dominant state integrating nonfungible goods, making them irreplaceable. The superordinate shares access to these goods, described as a beneficial offer for subordinates. Stage 3, ′Verticalization,′ involves policymakers in the superordinate state reforming relationships, either by extracting more or reforming their approach. The stage highlights the risk of instability and the potential for subordinates to repay past favors. A curved line represents the stages, with labels (a), (b) and (c) indicating transitions between stages. An arrow on the left indicates the progression of stages from 1 to 3.
Before continuing, we should clarify that the life cycle is not presented here as an iron law but as a tool to help conceptualize the growth and evolution of superordinate–subordinate relationships. While the behaviours associated with each stage may resemble a set of bargaining strategies, we caution that these strategies are best understood in the context of changing configurations of fungible and nonfungible goods, which are often tied to broader historical processes of growth and decline. Moreover, this life cycle model is an ideal type intended to be what Heiskanen and Zarakol call a ‘traveling concept’Footnote 35 and is deliberately illustrated with numerous historical and non-Western examples of how these dynamics have occurred in different contexts and eras. But we are not arguing that hierarchy is natural or universal. To clarify, our model is examining processes resulting from the decision of a polity to embark on hierarchy formation, but we are not assuming that all polities make this decision – and even less so that these decisions are accepted without resistance. We also note that ideal types are useful in highlighting key similarities in political and sociological processes across space and time, but they are also invariably broad brushstrokes that risk flattening out the richness of the historical record.Footnote 36
Stage One – the aspiring superordinate
Our model begins with an aspirant state seeking to establish superordinate relations over one or more of its peers. Its motivation may be external, such as a power vacuum in the region or the emergence of new threats and opportunities due to technological change; or it can be internal, such as the emergence of a new ideology or political culture among elites that prioritizes superordination.Footnote 37 Historically, the most direct way of creating superordination is appropriating enough fungible resources to become dominant over one’s neighbours. This approach assumes that legitimacy can be secured after achieving a preponderance of fungible resources and is not always a rational strategy because of the risks it entails.Footnote 38
A more cautious superordination strategy requires a state to employ vertical trade-offs whereby ostensibly equal interactions with a peer serve to create path-dependencies or long-term incremental advantages. We use the term ‘vertical trade-offs’ to underscore how a state’s seemingly generous input in the present is intended to lead to larger outputs in the future. Key attributes of vertical trade-offs include language or actions that emphasize equality and a focus on cooperation for reasons of efficiency or joint profit. However, for the aspirant, these ‘equal’ interactions are intended to create long-term political, economic, and ideational interdependence in their favour – often seeking to attain local versions of what Farrell and NewmanFootnote 39 call ‘weaponized interdependence’. An example of this is a state spending resources to intervene in a neighbouring civil war to prop up one faction in the expectation of being rewarded with economic or territorial concessions by the grateful winner – which appears to have been a factor motivating Japanese intervention in Siberia during the Russian Civil War.Footnote 40 This can also be seen in economic cooperation projects. For example, during the Cold War the construction of gas pipelines between the USSR and Western Europe was seen by US scholars and policymakers in terms resembling a vertical trade-off; cheap Soviet gas in the present was creating the foundations for European dependency in the future.Footnote 41
In situations of near-perfect equality, vertical trade-offs between secondary states are a viable strategy because of uncertainty about who is benefiting from the arrangement. Is the winner the state receiving the fungible goods now, or is the winner the state hoping for a large return on its investment in the future? Moreover, vertical trade-offs often involve the extension of networks into each other’s domestic spaces, which further complicates the picture because decisions that benefit one group of stakeholders in a state may not benefit the state at large.Footnote 42 This means that a state could be slipping into a position of subordination even though some domestic stakeholders are individually profiting. An example of this is the case of the Delian League, where Athens’ allies preferred to give financial contributions instead of performing military service. For the individual citizens of the allied states, military service and the risk of death was an unwelcome duty, so financial payments were preferable even though in the long term it meant that Athens’ military capabilities grew exponentially while those of its allied states atrophied.Footnote 43 As Ma muses, ‘[w]hy did the allies participate … and collude actively in their own subordination?’.Footnote 44
These vertical trade-offs are the root of many postcolonial theories of hegemony as exploitation and deception because incremental transactions occurring between ostensible equals create long-term imbalances. Although vertical trade-offs are described by their practitioners as mutually beneficial transactions between equals, superordination-seeking states require these trade-offs to be profitable. This blurs easily into coercive behaviour, especially once gaps in relative power begin to occur between the parties. The frequent making and breaking of treaties between European settlers and indigenous peoples, which progressively dispossessed the latter of property rights in North America, fits such a model of deeply predatory vertical trade-offs.Footnote 45
However, hierarchical orders based on simple predominance in fungible goods are unstable in the long term because they are highly exposed to competition by other potential superordinates possessing the same good. Moreover, states that seek primacy in fungible goods through heavy-handed extractive vertical trade-offs tend to face growing resentment and resistance, such as in the brutal capitalist extraction model employed by the late nineteenth-century Congo Free State.Footnote 46 For many scholars, these coercive relationships based on physical (or financial) dominance do not even count as ‘true’ hierarchies because legitimacy and rightful authority are absent.Footnote 47
Stage Two – the mature superordinate
Stage Two is characterized by actors seeking to turn a temporary position of dominance into a position of rightful dominance. This legitimacy can be produced discursively by articulating an ideology that creates a shared community in which the dominant actor’s superior position is justified. As described by Williams, the Gramscian conception of hegemony is not only coercion but social engineering capable of creating ‘a spontaneous attractor, generating self-organising social and political currents in its wake’.Footnote 48 This manufacturing of consent is a reoccurring feature of all hegemonic and imperial orders and often revolves around claims that the dominant actor is itself a nonfungible good, i.e. they are non-interchangeable with other states and uniquely contribute to human progress. These legitimizing discourses have included Japanese Pan-Asianist discourses in the 1930s,Footnote 49 Assyrian claims of Ashur’s divine mandate,Footnote 50 Roman imperial ideology,Footnote 51 and the Byzantine Kaiseridee (‘imperial idea’).Footnote 52
But how persuasive are these hierarchical worldviews? It is possible to imagine some subordinate actors participating in unequal symbolic communities solely because they are convinced by the superordinate’s ideology, but this is a tenuous foundation for a lasting hierarchical order. Comparative scholarship on tributary empires finds that the ruling centre’s narratives are often susceptible to being co-opted or resisted by actors in the periphery.Footnote 53 This suggests that physical dominance and ideology alone are not always sufficient, and stability is more likely if subordinates also receive tangible payoffs to participate in the system. Historically, ideologies have been supplemented by the circulation of rare or nonfungible goods from the superordinate to its subordinates. These flows have ranged from pigsFootnote 54 to egg-shell pottery gobletsFootnote 55 to nuclear know-how.Footnote 56 These rare goods, impossible or difficult to source from other actors in the international system, have traditionally served to demonstrate and justify rightful authority.
Therefore, Stage Two of our model consists of a superordinate who provides horizontal trade-offs to its subordinates. We use the terminology ‘horizontal’ trade-off because these exchanges typically involve a clear and immediate exchange: the superordinate provides access to a nonfungible good to a subordinate in exchange for their immediate obedience and cooperation in a different issue area. Horizontal trade-offs are distinct from vertical trade-offs because of the visibility of the hierarchical relationship, the incompatible nature of the goods being exchanged, and the tendency to describe it as a social contract between entire states or peoples rather than as a more bounded form of cooperation. In short, these horizontal trade-offs legitimize the hierarchical relationship by embedding it in a mutually constructed community in which both sides openly admit differences in status and authority.Footnote 57 Historical examples include reciprocal but unequal contracts such as treaties of vassalage in ancient Mesopotamia,Footnote 58 Roman treaties of amicitia,Footnote 59 the Chinese kowtow ritual,Footnote 60 and the papacy’s support for sacerdotal kingship in Medieval Europe.Footnote 61 After the Second World War, similar contracts saw the US provide expensive levels of security to its allies in exchange for sovereignty sacrifices.Footnote 62
Horizontal trade-offs seek to demonstrate that the superordinate’s advantage over its peers is not only due to the quantity but also the quality of its power. Superordination is at least partly naturalized or justified in reference to the hegemon’s unique possession of nonfungible assets, which it gives to subordinates, almost like a gift, in exchange for their more modest contributions to the relationship. As a result, these horizontal trade-offs between a superordinate and subordinate form the basis of many ‘positive’ accounts of hierarchy, including celebrations of US hegemony as beneficial because it allows for ‘participation and mutual gain’,Footnote 63 or descriptions of the Chinese tributary system showing how subordinates willingly participated and were rewarded with cultural benefits.Footnote 64 However, it is important to remember that nonfungibility is produced not only through an object’s intrinsic scarcity but also the social construction of its status as something special and desirable. This means that the superordinate must continuously invest material and ideational resources to maintain its nonfungibility and differentiate itself from alternate providers.
Stage Three – the declining superordinate
Ideally, a horizontal trade-off would involve a nonfungible good that is not diminished through sharing, but in practice the superordinate must continuously shoulder the burden of maintaining its nonfungible good – be it a shrine complex, advanced technology, or the world’s most effective navy. Compounding this, subordinates can skillfully lean into the superordinate’s narratives to increase their benefits, which eventually creates a free rider problem. For example, officialdom in East Asian tributary systems such as Joseon Korea frequently complained about being exploited by subordinates’ repeated (and unsolicited) tributary visits that drained state revenue and gave few benefits in return.Footnote 65
Stage Three occurs when the superordinate starts to believe that their horizontal trade-offs are unfair to themselves. For example, a superordinate may feel that it is getting a bad deal out of the horizontal trade-offs with its subordinates because their contributions are not as valuable as the nonfungible goods being given in exchange, suspect that its subordinates are seeking to replicate certain key nonfungible goods, or are threatened by the emergence of rival providers. Note that the superordinate’s decline may or may not be empirically true, but the perception alone is important for our purposes because this is what causes the superordinate’s behaviour to change. When this happens, the superordinate is increasingly likely to resort to a policy of verticalization. This means that formerly horizontal trade-offs are now increasingly turned back into vertical trade-offs in which subordinates’ gains are considered to already exist but their payment for these gains is overdue. This process is also marked by attempts to revalue the superordinate’s nonfungible goods, create new tiers of access, or become more extractive. Thus, instead of providing nonfungible goods in exchange for the subordinate’s sacrifice of a portion of its sovereignty (a horizontal trade-off), the superordinate now starts to also ask the subordinates for burden-sharing payments or other concessions in addition to the original sacrifice of a portion of their sovereignty. A classic example of this is the British Crown’s attempt to extract taxes from the Thirteen Colonies in the aftermath of the French and Indian War.Footnote 66 Likewise, the Delian League began with Athens taking the risks and responsibility of leadership but then became increasingly extractive and predatory towards its allies during the Peloponnesian War.Footnote 67
There are several key characteristics of verticalization. On the surface, it is a continuation of the horizontal trade-off because the superordinate describes their nonfungible goods as a gift freely given to its subordinates. But in contrast to horizontal trade-offs, which locate the hierarchical exchange of favors in the present or near future (i.e. ‘in exchange for your obedience I will protect you’), verticalization often ignores the subordinate’s sacrifice of sovereignty and inflates the value of the benefits they have received (i.e. ‘I have generously protected you for decades at great burden to my own people but now you need to do more’). In these ways, the social contract is reframed as an overdue bill for the subordinate to pay. This dynamic can be seen in Rome’s growing military mobilization of its socii, or allies, for overseas wars in the Middle Republic, which contributed to the outbreak of the Social War in 91 BCE.Footnote 68 Verticalization can be shallow, such as asking subordinates to increase their contributions of fungible goods to maintain their access to current benefits, but deeper forms may ask subordinates to contribute directly to the maintenance and creation of the same nonfungible good that underlays the hierarchical relationship. To continue the example, on the eve of the Social War Rome’s allies are estimated to have been contributing more than twice the number of soldiers to the legions than Rome itself,Footnote 69 even as the protective might of these legions continued to justify the unequal treaties of friendship subordinating Rome’s allies.
Verticalization comes at a cost. If successful, it can replenish or safeguard the superordinate’s reserves of fungible and nonfungible assets, but if taken too far it strips away the subordinate’s last vestiges of autonomy, a process that scholars of tributary empires term ‘provincialization’.Footnote 70 Harshly implemented verticalization can also incentivize subordinates to seek alternatives that reduce or remove their dependency, or turn to rival providers of similar goods. Particularly because nonfungible goods are highly contextual in nature, heavy-handed superordinate behaviour can cause subordinates to re-evaluate the meaning of these goods – or even attempt to create their own.
Demonstrating the hierarchy life cycle in world politics
In this section, we demonstrate the scalability of the model through two very different case studies. The aspiring and the mature superordinate (Stages One and Two) are applied to the case of Saudi Arabia’s ascent as a secondary state within its immediate Arabian Peninsula subregion in the early twentieth century, and its subsequent transition to its current position as what Maximilian Felsch observes as ‘the Arab [Persian] Gulf region’s hegemon’.Footnote 71 For a superordinate concerned about its relative decline (Stage Three), we turn to the US’ attempts to restructure its hegemonic social contracts with Northeast Asian subordinates: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula (Stages One and Two)
The creation and expansion of the modern Saudi Arabian state from 1902 to 1932 exemplifies Stage One of our model. In a landscape populated by autonomous tribal polities during an era of European and Ottoman decline – described by one biographer as ‘a power-vacuum and incipient chaos’,Footnote 72 Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (‘Ibn Saud’) had very little to differentiate himself from rivals with more manpower, greater wealth, or control of key pilgrimage sites. Instead, Ibn Saud primarily deployed a strategy emphasizing the accumulation of fungible resources (i.e. military force). However, as the ruler of a relatively weak territory who initially lacked great power patrons, Ibn Saud could only create this military power by forging vertical trade-offs with multiple allied tribal groupings and co-opting their military resources. Ultimately, creating a central Arabian hegemony was not inevitable, but rather required Ibn Saud to use ‘ceaseless social strategies’Footnote 73 to hold these tribal conglomerations together, including appeals to common interests, intermarriage, delegation of authority, repeatedly forgiving treacherous but militarily useful tribal leaders, and allowing beneficial allotments of plunder and low taxation.Footnote 74 In this way, ‘coercive action became a collaborative venture and confederations gave Ibn Saud executive coercive capacity’.Footnote 75
In the short term, allied tribes benefited from vertical trade-offs with the nascent Saudi state, but in the long term these relationships created dangerous path dependencies. As his territorial acquisitions grew, Ibn Saud steadily eroded the economic and political autonomy of his allies. This included using the prestige from his conquests of geopolitically significant locations to access foreign subsidies, first from the Ottomans and then the British, which further shifted the local balance of power in his favour.Footnote 76 He also encouraged the Ikhwan movement, which led to the sedentarization of key tribes, and utilized Wahhabi religious ideology to undercut tribal loyalties and create a ‘supertribe’ centred on himself.Footnote 77 When individual groups revolted, battlefield defeat eroded their autonomy even more. In this way, the tribes became the victims of the coercive apparatus they themselves had helped create. After a failed rebellion, even the Ikhwan were fully absorbed into the new Saudi Arabian polity by 1930.Footnote 78
Although usually analysed from the perspective of state-building, Saudi attempts at hierarchy formation initially extended beyond the modern-day borders of the Saudi state to encompass the entire Arabian Peninsula and beyond.Footnote 79 In post-war Syria, for example, Saudi Arabia similarly drew upon an aggressive toolbox of vertical trade-off strategies including ‘scores of secretive means’ such as bribing politicians and political groups, funding newspapers, supporting coups, manipulating domestic political processes, and generous inter-state loans.Footnote 80 But the diminishing returns experienced by the Saudis as they sought to dominate the Arabian Peninsula and neighbouring states primarily through force and ‘more of everything’ oil-financed strategies resembles the low durability type of hegemony associated with Stage One of the life cycle model. Particularly, Riyadh’s interventions in Yemen, the peninsula’s second largest state, faced significant local resistance, preventing the emergence of an ideologically aligned subordinate.Footnote 81 Coercion and extraction of fungible resources from subordinates often engenders resistance or outside intervention. Indeed, the traditional politics of the interior of the Arabian Peninsula had historically been characterized by short-lived cycles of this nature.
What eventually made Riyadh’s hegemony more stable than its predecessors was its successful cultivation of nonfungible resources and its willingness to offer horizontal trade-offs to subordinates. The capture of Mecca in 1924 and of Medina in 1925 gave Ibn Saud possession of the first and second holiest Islamic sites and thus provided the nonfungible resources needed for entering Stage Two. But this policy change required overcoming former partners and allies who realized – too late – that they were the losers of vertical trade-offs. By facilitating pilgrimage (Hajj) to the shrines, Ibn Saud positioned himself as the sole responsible leader to the wider Muslim world, even if it angered many of his extremist Ikhwan followers. Indeed, tribal revolts would consume the early years of the Saudi state, and pilgrimage revenue initially plummeted – falling to almost nothing in 1931.Footnote 82 In 1935, Ibn Saud was even attacked by Yemeni assassins while performing the Hajj, underscoring how external as well as internal actors initially resisted Saudi attempts to intertwine religious and political hegemony.Footnote 83 From these humble beginnings, however, custodianship of religious sites has become an important pillar of Saudi influence among Muslim communities.
The Saudi state has systematically increased the nonfungibility of Mecca and Medina by economically and politically investing in its custodianship, a process helped by its unprecedented oil wealth in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 84 The Saudi government has improved and expanded infrastructure around Mecca and Medina to be able to host greater numbers of pilgrims. This is not just about tourism revenue but reflects a broader claim to leadership by strengthening the association between the Saudi monarchy and these sites. From 1986, Saudi monarchs have asserted themselves above other Islamic heads of state by replacing the title of ‘his majesty’ with ‘Khadim al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn’ (‘Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’). Similarly, annual Hajj speeches provide a platform for Saudi Arabia’s leaders to claim Islamic leadership – such as King Salman’s 2017 symbolic assertion that ‘The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia represents the heart of the Muslim world’.Footnote 85 Additionally, as noted by Niu and Metwally,Footnote 86 the Saudi state’s differential quota for pilgrims exemplifies a core principle that ‘Saudi Muslims should leave more opportunities for foreign Muslims’. From the perspective of our model, this is essentially a horizontal trade-off. In exchange for facilitating the Hajj, Saudi Arabia claims to be treated as an irreplaceable leader of the Muslim world.
In the 1980s, though, the Iranian Revolution triggered unprecedented challenges to Saudi custodianship of Mecca and Medina alongside a broader threat from Revolutionary Iran to the legitimacy and stability of all Gulf rulers. At this critical juncture, Saudi Arabia chose to respond to this threat by offering a deeper, security-focused horizontal trade-off to its smaller neighbours in the form of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Although the organization was described as a coalition of equals, in practice GCC membership meant symbolic acceptance of ‘the institutionalization of Saudi leadership’, in what Gause calls ‘probably the most successful institutional innovation in Saudi foreign policy history’.Footnote 87 From the outset, indications of Saudi Arabia’s symbolically unequal domination over its five GCC co-members included its relative size; its vast oil wealth, which by the 1980s had ‘transformed’ it into an ‘economic powerhouse’Footnote 88; its central geographical positioning as the only member bordering each of the others, and the GCC civilian headquarters’ permanent location in Riyadh.Footnote 89
Security from Saudi Arabia’s primary rival – Iran and Shia Islam more generally – was a key component of this social contract. Riyadh maintained perceptions of its nonfungibility by emphasizing the sectarian ‘threat’ posed by Shia Iran, with ‘[t]he Saudi clerical establishment produc[ing] an overflow of anti-Shiite publications to blunt the pan-Islamic appeal of the Islamic revolution’Footnote 90 and rapidly expanding defence collaboration thereafter resulted in GCC members establishing a joint military force in 1984 named the Peninsula Shield Force which, like the GCC itself, was headquartered on Saudi Arabian territory and dominated by Riyadh’s military.Footnote 91 This horizontal trade-off exchanging Saudi Arabia’s superior military capabilities for a sacrifice of sovereignty was forcefully demonstrated at the height of the Arab Spring in 2011, when the Bahrain Government invited a Saudi-led intervention force to help guard against domestic opposition.
As our model would predict, Saudi Arabia’s relationships with its neighbours are becoming more openly framed in the language of horizontal trade-offs. This was illustrated by the crisis of 2017, in which Riyadh led in the largely GCC-oriented diplomatic and economic coercion of Qatar, the would-be defector from the group. A long list of initial demands caused Qatar’s foreign minister to accuse the coalition of ‘demanding that we have to surrender our sovereignty’.Footnote 92 Although Saudi superordination is becoming more explicit, it also becomes more legitimate if subordinates accept its proffered horizontal trade-offs. These trade-offs can include both security and economic goods, but they ultimately revolve around the Saudi custodianship of Mecca and Medina. This produces a situation akin to Akbarzadeh and Ahmed’sFootnote 93 observation that Saudi empire-like behaviour is often legitimized by Muslim perceptions of its rightful leadership.
But what does the future hold for this Saudi-led hierarchical order? Our model suggests short-term stability. Unlike a temporary advantage in fungible goods, it is difficult for its subordinates to replicate or replace Mecca and Medina with their own religious sites due to their enormous historical and cultural significance. As researcher Omar Al-Ubaydli noted in 2022, ‘[u]nlike [the energy sector], where Saudi Arabia always has to worry about future competitors, in the area of Hajj and Umrah, they are guaranteed to have zero competition in perpetuity’.Footnote 94 The long-term question is whether the Saudi leadership will continue to invest in the nonfungible goods needed to maintain the horizontal trade-off. For now, the answer appears to be yes. In 2024, Saudi Arabia rewarded its subordinates by initiating new tiers of pilgrimage access that privileged GCC countries over other states through access to multiple visa pathways – a mechanism which Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Hajj and Umrah announced by declaring to GCC residents that ‘Mecca and Medina eagerly await your visit’.Footnote 95
The US and Northeast Asian allies (Stage Three)
The US’ rise to the position of global hegemon in the post-1945 era broadly aligns with Stages One and Two of our model, and Stage Two has been particularly well documented in the literature.Footnote 96 In brief, US expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exemplified the exploitative side of hierarchy formation, where vertical trade-offs and coercion extracted fungible resources from indigenous peoples and weaker states in the Caribbean and Latin America.Footnote 97 But, by the mid-twentieth century, US hegemony increasingly centred on the creation of generous social contract hierarchies, such as the post-Second World War Marshall Plan in Europe.Footnote 98 In Northeast Asia, these contracts manifested in unequal security treaties with Japan, South Korea, and the Republic of China (‘Taiwan’). Asian partners sacrificed substantial parts of their sovereignty, including deeply embedded authority over their foreign policies and access to military bases, in exchange for a basket of US nonfungible goods including nuclear-backed defence guarantees, access to leading-edge technologies such as semiconductors, and low-cost admission to the lucrative US market.
The role of nonfungible goods is an important part of these social contracts. For example, in 2023, amidst a growing crisis with North Korea, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol boarded a US ballistic missile submarine and was photographed using its periscope, proclaiming ‘it is meaningful and reassuring to visit … one of the most powerful strategic assets in existence’.Footnote 99 This episode underscores the political ‘charisma of objects’,Footnote 100 particularly how subordinate leaders can benefit both domestically and regionally by being associated with their superordinate’s nonfungible goods. Such horizontal trade-offs are the focus of liberal theories of hegemony as a social contract because there are tangible benefits for both sides in the transaction despite the power disparities between them. Indeed, the superordinate is often perceived as giving vastly more than any single subordinate. As Kagan observed, the willingness of the US to sustain these unequal trade-offs has been a ‘kind of enlightened self-interest that, in practice, comes dangerously close to resembling generosity’.Footnote 101 In Stage Two this ‘generosity’ knits together the social contract, but by Stage Three it becomes the chief problem.
Although US dissatisfaction with its hierarchies has become impossible to ignore during the Trump era, US pressure on subordinates to engage in greater burden sharing dates back to pressure placed upon West Germany and (to a lesser extent) Japan, from the 1960s onwards.Footnote 102 By the 1980s, these anxieties underpinned US–Japan trade tensions and concerns about exploitation were shared by many US elites.Footnote 103 In the semiconductor industry, Japanese business practices were labelled ‘predatory’ and ‘unfair’ to the US,Footnote 104 and illicit exports of advanced dual-use technology from Japan to the USSR resulted in nine US congresspeople publicly destroying a Toshiba radio with sledgehammers in 1987.Footnote 105 Such trade concerns were partly addressed by the 1985 Plaza Accords, which amounted to a mini verticalization of trade relations between the US and multiple economic subordinates – including Japan – by devaluing the US dollar to advantage US exports, benefitting US semiconductor firms in their competition with Japan.Footnote 106 Similarly, the 1986 US-Japanese Semiconductor Trade Agreement expanded market access for US semiconductor firms in Japan, and to reduce the alleged ‘dumping’ of Japanese-made semiconductors in the US.Footnote 107 However, despite these agreements, the US’ share of semiconductor product exports continued to decrease from around 18% in 2002 to 5% in 2021.Footnote 108
Today, the rise of China has heightened anxieties about US decline. The US’ response to this power shift has not only targeted China but also involves the renegotiation of social contracts with its own subordinates. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have become key targets for aggrieved US policymakers who want them to pay more for access to US security and markets. At his 2025 nomination hearing, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick complained that countries including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan ‘have taken advantage of our (the US’) good nature … I mean, they’ve just taken advantage of us’.Footnote 109 Similarly, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton railed against ‘unfair trade practices’ that ‘tilt the playing field against American workers and businesses’, naming Japan as among those who have ‘kept their goods artificially cheap for years by holding down the value of their currencies’Footnote 110; and Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that Taiwan has ‘stolen’ the US’ semiconductor industry. Linking trade practices to the US’ provision of security goods, Trump has stated that ‘Taiwan, they stole our chip business … and they want protection’.Footnote 111
The US’ attempts to reform the social contracts with its three Northeast Asian subordinates have partly centred on the proposed ‘Chip 4’ alliance. Although ostensibly about coordinating semiconductor supply chains between equals, this initiative is really focused on reshoring semiconductor manufacturing to the US through major new subordinate investments, and export controls to prevent leakage of nonfungible advanced semiconductor technology to China. Initial signs of the US’ verticalization success include Taiwanese firm TSMC’s announcement of a $165 billion investment in US-based manufacturing, with the most recent commitment of $100 billion including ‘three new fabrication plants, two advanced packaging facilities and a major R&D team center’ in what TSMC has called ‘the largest single foreign direct investment in U.S. history’.Footnote 112 South Korean semiconductor firms Samsung and SK hynix have respectively pledged approximately $37 and $4 billion in the USFootnote 113; and have also been weighing additional investments, with one industry official noting in 2025 that ‘Trump appears to be threatening to prevent Samsung Electronics and SK hynix from receiving subsidies as planned by his predecessor, unless they invest more in the U.S.’.Footnote 114 Simultaneously, after US pressure, Japan established a ‘de facto ban’ on the export of ‘23 types of chip-related equipment and materials’ to China in 2023, matching the US’ own export controls.Footnote 115 Following President Biden’s 2022 Chips and Science Act, which included subsidies to attract foreign investment in semiconductors, the 2025 announcement of punitive US tariffs of 25%, 24%, and 32% on imports of Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (respectively), indicated that the US may be rebalancing from ‘carrot’ to ‘stick’ in how it promotes verticalization flows.
These US attempts at verticalization have faced a mix of resistance and compliance. When President Trump called for Taiwan to increase defence spending to 10% of GDP, even though no US troops are based on the island, the premier of Taiwan, Cho Jung-tai, called the proposal ‘impossible’.Footnote 116 On the other hand, Japan’s responses have been more subtle. They have prioritized engagement and compliance with US demands in the hope of raising their status vis-à-vis other subordinates. Most recently, Japan’s novel ‘one theater’ concept positions Tokyo ahead of South Korea in its willingness to follow the US’ perspective on regional flashpoints. South Korea has also seen the re-ordering of US hegemony in the region as an opportunity to reposition itself,Footnote 117 but has generally focused more on containing verticalization rather than elevating itself through compliance. Domestic pressure is part of the reason for this, with street protests against the first Trump administration’s cost-sharing demands in 2019 featuring chants including ‘[w]e are not a U.S. colony! We are not an ATM machine!’, and one activist asking ‘[h]ow is it possible for a tenant to ask for five-fold increase in rent from its landlord?’.Footnote 118 While it is unlikely that South Korea will reject verticalization altogether, the surge in domestic debates about the country pursuing an independent nuclear arsenal capabilityFootnote 119 serves as a reminder that substituting a hegemon’s nonfungible goods becomes increasingly attractive as the price of subordination becomes higher. The verticalization process revolves around the superordinate’s attempts to protect and enhance the nonfungibility of its goods – not only in relation to its external competitor (China) but also its own subordinates. Therefore, US subordinates who have developed their own comparatively nonfungible resources and possess capabilities that Washington lacks – such as South Korea’s shipbuilding expertise or Taiwan’s so-called ‘silicon shield’ of advanced chip fab design technology – have more bargaining power but are also primary targets of strategies seeking to co-opt and re-absorb these capabilities. In 2025, one advisor to South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense argued that Seoul has the technology, and also ‘the surge capacity to provide an immediate remedy for the US’ idled shipbuilding capacity’, allowing the US to better compete with China, while simultaneously providing Korean shipbuilding firms with ‘new opportunities’ to ‘strengthen their business capacity’.Footnote 120 Similarly, in 2024 Taiwan’s vice minister for science and technology argued that their national chip industry was ‘impossible to just replace, and hard to copy’. In this way, even as the US seeks to verticalize its hierarchies, it is engaged in a game of skill and positioning with subordinates seeking to create their own nonfungibility.
Conclusion
Having established a consensus that hierarchies exist as a meaningful feature in the ‘anarchic’ international society, second-generation debates on hierarchies continue to dispute their material or social origins, their propensity towards exploitation or mutual benefits, and their capacity for durability. The policy implications of these debates are increasingly salient. Following the 2025 inauguration of US President Donald Trump, Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen complained that while Washington had once enjoyed ‘moral legitimacy’ for its presence in Asia, the ‘image’ of the US ‘has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent’.Footnote 121 There is a temptation to see this as a unique product of Trump’s leadership style; rather, we suggest it is better understood as part of a broader historical pattern of hierarchy formation and dissolution. Superordinates often rise through exploitative and coercive strategies, then employ generous social contracts based on nonfungible goods as they mature, and end up resorting to more exploitative practices as they perceive themselves to be in decline.
Of course, the hierarchy life cycle proposed here is an ideal type model of the rise and decline of superordinates. We are not suggesting that all states follow this trajectory. Some may never have the requisite resources, opportunities, or desire to initiate hierarchies, while others – like the post-Cold War Russian state – may inherit a wide range of nonfungible and fungible assets from the beginning. This cycle is not deterministic, only probabilistic. We expect that the wavelength of each hierarchy life cycle, as well as possible oscillations back and forth between stages, is shaped by factors such as a polity’s geographical location, the type of nonfungible resources it prioritizes, choices by individual policymakers, and exogenous factors like technological and cultural change. Likewise, the concept of nonfungible goods can be contextual and difficult to operationalize. Especially, the intersubjective nature of fungibility has long been noted: ‘[t]hings are fungible or not fungible, not in their own nature, but with reference to the terms of the given obligation’.Footnote 122 For this reason, the recipient-centric perspective employed in this paper offers a useful vocabulary to explore how states are pursuing superordination by strategically creating contexts in which they alone are viewed as nonfungible. This also opens a fruitful conversation with critical scholarship’s parallel account of colonialism as a disempowering process of commodification whereby distinct and unique local knowledge, things, places, and people are converted into fungible objects capable of being ‘anatomized into exchangeable parts to be stored, shipped, sold, combined with other parts’.Footnote 123
Also, the scalability of this concept allows it to be defined locally, regionally, or globally. For example, a country’s manufacturing capabilities may be modest at a global scale, but in its local context it may possess sufficient technical know-how to attract subordinates. Therefore, as we have shown in the cases of Saudi Arabia and the US, an additional strength of our model is that, whereas the existing literature on hegemonic stability and long cycle theories is based on global hegemons, this model of change is scalable from great power hegemons to what Hynd and ConnollyFootnote 124 have recently identified as secondary state-led international hierarchies operating at regional and sub-regional levels.
The hierarchy life cycle model is a modest but important step towards bridging the gap between critical and liberal approaches to international hierarchies. Rather than seeing exploitation or rightful authority as fixed features, our model helps elaborate when and how hierarchical relationships shift between exploitative and more cooperative modes of behaviour. Would-be superordinate states act to establish hierarchies through two basic mechanisms. First is the accumulation of fungible goods in a process of vertical trade-offs with one’s neighbours that are designed to extract unequal benefits from the relationships. However, if taken to extremes, this extractive approach leads to the erasure of subordinate polities or unstable hierarchies with no legitimacy – exemplified by brutal colonial regimes like the Congo Free State. A more successful strategy is to use temporary advantages in fungible goods to create or control nonfungible goods that can be used to reward subordinates for their obedience. The superordinates’ provision of nonfungible goods creates a more legitimate and stable relationship with its subordinates, and the difference in material and ideational goods being exchanged makes it easier to define these interactions as mutually beneficial. Eventually, this relationship can break down when the superordinate starts to believe that it is declining or being exploited by its own subordinates – culminating in a more extractive and predatory stage where the superordinate asks its subordinates to ‘pay more’ for their own subordination. However, as we have demonstrated in the cases of Saudi Arabia and the US, subordinates are far from passive in their experiences of international hierarchy, and may actively seek to promote, resist, and otherwise shape their positions in games of skill in which exploitation and consent become inextricably mixed.
Video Abstract
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