Much of the field of international relations remains dominated by the claim that international politics is a realm of anarchy, a self-help system in which international order is a fragile product produced by balances of material power and national interests defined and calculated in light of them. David Lake disagrees. In this book, he seeks to demonstrate the existence of hierarchical interstate orders, and to explain their genesis, structure, and dynamics. At the center of this vision is the concept of authority and its effects on state relations. For Lake, once theorists of international relations loosen the grip of the formal-legal vision of sovereignty as territorially exclusive and indivisible authority underpinning their vision of a necessarily anarchic international system, they will see the importance of authority in producing international orders, and recognize that it is “a form of international power, coequal with and perhaps even more important than coercion” (p. ix).

Authority is a relational concept; it relies upon the recognition of the authority of the dominant by the subordinate. In Lake's vision of international hierarchy, authority arises from a “relational authority contract” that has the provision of order at its core. As he summarizes it: “[A]uthority rests on an exchange of political order for legitimacy and compliance. To give up some portion of their sovereignty, subordinate states must get something in return—usually international security—that is equally if not more valuable” (p. x). Sovereignty is thus not absolute: It is in practice divisible. This divisibility allows for the operation of structures of order that do not depend on coercion alone, but that also rest upon the recognition by subordinate states of the legitimate authority of great powers, as well as an attendant set of “accepted rights and duties” (p. 8) relating to the actions of each partner, including those surrounding the exercise of coercion. Order, in turn, allows for regularized relations that benefit all parties, including in the economic sphere—albeit not necessarily equally.

On the basis of this understanding of authority, Lake builds a model of international domination and subordination based on economic and military factors and measures. Among his most important conclusions is that, contrary to frequent assertion, states do not have to choose between balancing and bandwagoning policies within an anarchic international system. Instead, their actions usually reflect their location in hierarchies of authority that produce relatively stable—if historically specific—patterns of support and allegiance. Since these hierarchies are reproduced through practices, both the dominant and the subordinate must benefit from them and each needs to recognize the bargain that underpins their ordered relations and act to reproduce it. Indeed, one of Lake's primary inspirations in developing his arguments grew out of what he sees as the failure of the G. W. Bush administration to act within this logic during the 2003 Iraq war, a policy which he believes deeply damaged American legitimacy and authority.

There is little doubt that this book stands as a major contribution to IR and will become a significant reference point in the field. Lake's work pushes rationalist theory in new and important directions. His discussion of the way that a largely material theory of rational bargaining can generate explanations of authority, international orders, and their dynamics is an important advance. Inevitably, there are many areas where one could take issue with Hierarchy in International Relations, as no doubt many will. Certainly, Lake's account of the state of the art in IR theory will strike certain readers as somewhat constricted, and it is difficult to imagine that his attempt to develop a rationalist model of authority to the exclusion of social constructivist alternatives will not become a focus of debate. In the remainder of this brief review, however, I would like to focus on a small number of questions that indicate not only the breadth of the issues at stake but also how the arguments in the book may actually require moving beyond the theoretical boundaries it seeks to establish.

At the heart of these questions is the nature of authority and the sufficiency of seeing the hierarchical international order as an authority contract based on the provision of international order. Lake does not want to restrict the authority of dominant powers to simple accommodation based on the recognition of differential power. He, instead, casts it explicitly within the language of legitimacy. Legitimate authority comes with a “duty to comply” (p. 8). As he puts it, legitimate authority in IR emerges from a social contract “in which the dominant state provides a political order to the collection of individuals who compose the subordinate state, and those individuals confer rights on the dominant state to restrict their behavior and extract resources necessary to produce that order”(p. 8). This order need not be “fair” for it to be legitimate—though the benefits of order to all parties should not be disregarded lightly.

Yet, this clearly raises some difficult analytic and political questions that have long exercised contract theories of authority. To take only one illustration, despite his admonitions concerning the need to see sovereignty as divisible, Lake's rendering of international authority relations remains resolutely state-centric. As he puts it, legitimate international authority is the result of a situation where “dominant states protect their subordinates by building a political order in which coercion is relatively rare and come to their aid in countering specific threats or actual violence” (p. 10). Left at a level of interstate relations where subordinate states were protected from unwanted predation, such a formulation might in some circumstances be unobjectionable. But what if one replaced “state” with “regime,” and “external” threats with “internal” ones? In this case, the provision of order for a regime and the recognition by that regime of the legitimacy of the dominant power and its claims in exchange for its assistance could occur at the same time that the regime repressed or killed sections (perhaps even large sections) of the subordinate population who rejected the legitimacy of the regime and its international “contract.” This repression could even occur with the covert collusion of coercive forces from the dominant state, a factor that Lake's reliance on state-centric definitions of military domination elides.

A key question thus becomes ‘Who are the parties to this contract?’ Would such a situation be legitimate for the oppressed sectors of the population? Would they have a “duty” to see it as such, and to whom would this duty be owed? One wonders, for example, whether the citizens of much of eastern Europe under Soviet domination would have concurred, something that was far from inconsequential in the politics at the end of the Cold War. The history of some of the less salubrious aspects of U.S. foreign policy over the past century cannot help but raise similar questions. To his credit, Lake briefly raises such issues (citing, for instance, the relationship between the United States and the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic) in the book's conclusion. However, his view that this calls for future research into the role of “intermediaries” as “brokers” (pp. 179–80) in dominant–subordinate relations seems to skirt the question of whether these brokers might also be “enforcers,” while eliding deeper questions concerning the parties to an international contract and the idea of a legitimate contract based only on an exchange of order for authority.

The arguments in Hierarchy in International Relations extend far beyond these issues. But as even this short survey shows, this is a book that successfully pushes the boundaries of IR theory: The directions in which it leads should provide the basis for fertile debate across the field.