Books Discussed in This Review Essay
Adler-Nissen, Rebecca. Reference Adler-Nissen2015. Opting Out of the European Union: Diplomacy, Sovereignty and European Integration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Barder, Alexander. Reference Barder2015. Empire Within: International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories of Governance. London: Routledge.
Bukovansky, Mlada, Ian Clark, Robyn Eckersley, Richard MacKay Price, Christian Reus-Smit, and Nicholas J. Wheeler. Reference Bukovansky, Clark, Eckersley, Price, Reus-Smit and Wheeler2012. Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lake, David. 2009. Hierarchy in International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
In recent decades, globalizing processes have gathered intense attention for complicating the nature of political boundaries, authority, and sovereignty. Perhaps it is partly because of such developments that scholarship in International Relations (IR) now appeals far less frequently to anarchy and its systemic logics. In light of the analytic insufficiencies of anarchy-centered theories in the contemporary global context, a growing range of scholars is seeking to make sense of world politics through an analytical focus on hierarchies instead.Footnote 1
Hierarchies, understood broadly as any system through which actors are organized into vertical relations of super- and subordination, have long been of interest to social scientists, including some notable scholars in IR.Footnote 2 In recent years, however, the range of scholarship in IR concerned with hierarchies has expanded considerably. Building on economic, sociological, legal, and philosophical insights about the intertwined logics of formal equality and vertical stratification, researchers across the spectrum of theoretical and methodological commitments have inquired into the effects of ranked differentiation among actors on the political dynamics of such issues as global governance, economic relations, and security. Diverse though this scholarship is, it is nonetheless unified in suggesting two significant insights: first, that hierarchies are a ubiquitous feature of international (that is, inter-state) politics; and second, that they generate social, moral, and behavioral dynamics that are different from those created by other arrangements. In short, hierarchies matter (and have always mattered) in distinctive ways for world politics.
Hierarchy-centered approaches to IR promise to deliver what anarchy-centered approaches have not: a framework for theorizing and empirically analyzing world politics as a global system rather than just an international one. Anarchy-centered approaches reduce world politics to an international (that is, inter-state) system because they take state sovereignty as a “hard” given: that is, as an enduring fact of world politics, as clear in its boundaries, and as inextricable from state interests. In exposing the (historical and contemporary) softness of sovereignty—its contingency and porousness—globalizing processes have challenged scholars to theorize world politics more globally: in a manner that does not analytically conflate states with their sovereignty and so, by extension, does not privilege sovereignty as the only defining feature of the primary units in world politics.
To the extent that scholars have begun to think more globally about world politics, they have focused on issues and actors. Such topically narrow, predominantly midlevel inquiries, however, do not make explicit the broader contours of a global system, effectively leaving undisturbed anarchy-centered grand theorizing that represents world politics as an inter-state system. For this reason, some have even declared that the age of theorizing in IR is over.Footnote 3 We aim to demonstrate that this is not so: the concept of hierarchy offers a basis for uniting fragmented insights about world politics into an alternative (though not always competing) explanatory framework. By drawing our focus to structures of stratification and the differentiation of units, the concept of hierarchy suggests a perspective on world politics that accommodates but does not insist on sovereignty and that is systemic in scope.
At the core of this proposition are three features of hierarchical systems as they are represented across the growing IR literature on the topic. First, the structures of differentiation at the core of hierarchical systems are deeply implicated with power. Hierarchical systems are thus intrinsically political. Second, in world politics, hierarchies stratify, rank, and organize the relations not only among states but also other kinds of actors as well, and often even a mix of different actors within a single structure of differentiation. Third, there are many different kinds of hierarchical relations in world politics, each of which generate different logics in the sense of giving rise to different social, moral, and behavioral dynamics. However, because different hierarchies can and often do intersect each other, these logics can be nested. Taken together, these features suggest that a focus on hierarchies can both facilitate the kinds of systemic perspectives on world politics that made anarchy-centered theories so useful, and, unlike anarchy-centered theories, account for ongoing globalizing processes as a part of the system. The promise of hierarchy-centrism is of a more integrated theoretical framework from which may follow more cohesive analytical and empirical insights into contemporary world politics.
The purpose of this review essay is to facilitate the development of explicitly hierarchy-centric approaches to theorizing and empirical analysis of world politics. We start with the observation that despite burgeoning interest in hierarchies, only a few IR scholars have actually pursued explicitly hierarchy-centered theoretical and empirical analyses of world politics. The obstacles to an explicit hierarchy-centered research agenda within IR are therefore twofold: an unrecognized disjuncture in how hierarchies are (implicitly) conceived as a part of world politics; and the diversity of epistemological commitments among IR researchers concerned with hierarchy. Although there is significant scholarly convergence on the idea that hierarchies are intersubjectivelyFootnote 4 constituted systems structured by vertical stratification, there is considerable divergence regarding which such orders count as hierarchies in world politics. For some, all organized arrangements of inequality (that is, vertical actor-differentiation) ought to be treated analytically as hierarchies. Others, however, maintain that in the context of world politics, hierarchy ought to pertain for analytical purposes only to those vertical arrangements that differentiate actors according to their degrees of authority. Such differences could and should form the basis of productive debate and scholarly inquiry. But because most hierarchy-oriented research has not been explicit about how hierarchy should be conceptualized, these divergences in the understandings of hierarchy have gone largely unnoticed. Even when they have been noticed, conversations on these differences have been quickly derailed by more familiar and easily articulated differences of epistemology.
Incommensurable epistemologies, however, need not occlude commonalities that can generate potentially agenda-consolidating conversations. To show why and how, we undertake an analytical review of the literature in both book and article form. To provide as full an overview possible, we have interwoven our analysis of books with a discussion of noteworthy articles.
Hierarchy Conceptions in IR
Ironically, one of the most important hierarchy-oriented works in IR is also the very work that rendered natural the distinction of “the international” and the analytic primacy of anarchy: Theory of International Politics. Footnote 5 Waltz argues that there are only two kinds of orders: hierarchy and anarchy. Anarchy is the condition in which the features of hierarchy are absent, whereas hierarchy consists of “relations of super- and subordination in which ‘actors are formally differentiated according to the degrees of their authority, and their distinct functions.’”Footnote 6 Waltz further argues that whereas hierarchy is the realm of law, government, and order, anarchy is marked by their absence. This opposition between hierarchy and anarchy inscribes the dichotomy between domestic and international politics.Footnote 7 International politics comes into theoretical existence because of the boundary hierarchy sets around domestic politics. In short, Theory of International Politics implicates hierarchy in IR as its constitutive analytic other and thus makes anarchy the central feature of the discipline.
Given the increasing complexity of globalizing politics and the waning influence of neorealism, few scholars explicitly frame their research around the fact of formal international anarchy anymore. Even fewer invoke it as a cause of state behavior. But as a discipline, IR (still) approaches the study of world politics through the prism of anarchy. The very idea of an international (that is, inter-state) space of political relations that is conceptually and analytically distinctive from other kinds of political relations persists. IR is marked by a continued—albeit more complex—state-centrism.Footnote 8
Although the discipline of IR remains latently organized around an anarchy-centered conception of world politics, it has also long promulgated lines of research that complicate this framework by drawing attention to hierarchical arrangements within the formally anarchic international system. Most hierarchy-oriented scholarship is too implicit about its hierarchy orientation for its researchers to fathom hierarchy as a focal point of their research. The bulk of research that evokes the concept of hierarchy does so rather casually—for instance, as a descriptive modifier or synonym for the phenomenon that is the real focus of inquiry, such as empire, hegemony, identity, gender, imperialism, and race in IR. Hierarchy thus becomes central at the same time that it is left theoretically unexamined.Footnote 9 It is unsurprising then that much of what scholars have said about hierarchy in world politics remains underdeveloped, offering no clear alternative to an anarchy-centered vision. Things are improving, however: not only are there a number of key works that make hierarchy the focal point of their research but recently published literature offers evidence of greater awareness among IR scholars of hierarchy as a topic and analytic lens.Footnote 10 Thus taking stock of hierarchy research in IR requires reading widely across the discipline and between the lines of works that are more or less oriented toward hierarchy. Doing so reveals that arrangements of super- and subordination emerge in two different kinds IR scholarship: research that discloses within world politics relations of legitimate authority that, following conventional reasoning, should only have analytical importance within domestic political relations; and research that discloses within world politics structures of inequality that matter so profoundly to social, behavioral, and moral dynamics in world politics as to render formal equality among states analytically uninteresting. We label the first understanding of hierarchy as the narrow understanding and the second as the broad one. Both conceptions have in common the view of hierarchy as an intersubjectively or mutually constituted system. We take each in turn.
Hierarchies as Legitimate Authority: The Narrow Conception
This kind of intervention is most readily associated with scholarship in the liberal tradition in IR theory. As an approach to world politics, liberalism is ambivalent toward the idea that nation-states are the exclusive sites of legitimate political authority. By extension, liberalism sits in some tension with the notion that the formal sovereignty of states, and therefore anarchy, is so analytically significant in world politics. This tension is expressed through theoretical commitments such as liberal optimism about international law, the pluralistic conception of states (as indicated by the liberal preference for terms such as government and institutions rather than states), and the devotion to global capitalism as an economic model. Each of these exude suspicion of national borders as meaningful containers of political authority. As a matter of practice, however, liberal IR theory has tended to shy away from its own ambivalence, often conceding the primacy of the sovereign nation-state and anarchy.Footnote 11 But even as liberals concede, they still tend to pose research questions that draw attention to hierarchies within the international anarchy. Milner, for instance, has questioned whether anarchy necessarily implies absence of government because government takes many forms. In addition to central authorities that legitimately monopolize violence, governmental forms include the international institutions and laws that govern states. In noting this, Milner implicitly challenges the extent to which an exclusively anarchic conception of world politics makes sense.Footnote 12
Others have been more explicit, highlighting informal hierarchies in world politics by focusing on legitimate political authority among states under formal anarchy. Ikenberry and Kupchan's analysis of hegemony challenges the Waltzian logic of strict material positionality by arguing that hegemonic power works at the level of substantive beliefs rather than just material payoffs. Acquiescence emerges also from the diffusion of a set of normative ideals.Footnote 13 Even under anarchy, the hegemon therefore has a certain informal authority as a governor.Footnote 14 Legitimate relations of super- and subordination that transcend national borders are not just domestic phenomena but part of anarchic international orders as well. In fact, in Hierarchy in International Relations, Lake argues that hierarchies matter for how political relations unfold among all kinds of actors in world politics. Noting the significance in globalized politics of hierarchies in which states are subordinated to the legitimate, and sometimes even formal, authority of private, nonstate, and supranational actors, Lake calls for a more hierarchy-centered approach that could capture more of the politics in world politics.Footnote 15
Liberals are not the only scholars who have exposed authority-based hierarchical arrangements in international relations. Concerned with IR's neglect of the historical process by which international anarchy emerged, a number of constructivists have highlighted its evolution in and through hierarchies of various sorts. Reus-Smit introduces hierarchy through a historical focus on the evolution of the defining norms of international society and the informal political legitimacy granted to particular states through it.Footnote 16 Hobson and Sharman go further. They argue that such normative hierarchies can establish formal political authority in addition to informal, and have organized not only inter-state but all relations among all kinds of polities in history, including empires, civilizations, and cultures.Footnote 17 Although this body of constructivist hierarchy-oriented research differs from more liberal variants in its emphasis on historical contingency and the construction of social meaning, both draw attention to the effect of structures of legitimate political authority (informal and formal) on world politics.
A second, overlapping vein of constructivist hierarchy-oriented research has recently expanded the challenge by looking beyond legitimate political authority to the social authority on which all such hierarchies necessarily depend. The core insight here is that in relations of “rightful rule” world politics entails relations of “rightful role.” Actors—state and nonstate—become intelligible to each other as specific, differentiated kinds of subjects that, depending on their social value, acquire different degrees of social authority and influence over others. Connecting degree of social authorization to such factors as access to social capital and technical expertise, this line of research emphasizes the importance of hierarchies in governing not just what actors do in world politics, but which actors get to play which roles.Footnote 18 This line of research illuminates the social politics entailed in world politics that are obscured by anarchy-centered approaches.
Hierarchy as (Intersubjectively) Organized Inequality: The Broad Conception
The second way that hierarchy has surfaced in IR research is through research that discloses structures of inequality. Eclectic in its theoretical inspirations, scholarship in this vein converges around the idea that hierarchies are particular kinds of organizational forms, that is, systems that arrange units into unequal relationships with one another. To speak of a hierarchy then is to say nothing of the nature of the inequalities or of whether they are established through legitimate authority. In contrast to the first line of research, which identifies hierarchies in world politics through the existence of legitimate authority, in this line, hierarchy has nothing to do with the particular kind of power relations through which it is established. Emblematic of this organizational hierarchy-orientation in IR is Cooley's study in Logics of Hierarchy of the varied subsystems of stratification within anarchic international politics and the varied effects that these different systems of inequality have on the behavior of actors.Footnote 19 What emerges from such research is that hierarchies matter differently for various dimensions of world politics depending how the units are arranged; on the particular character of the relational inequalities among them; and on the specific forms of power they entail.Footnote 20 Compared with the narrow approaches discussed earlier, approaches that take a broad view of hierarchy rarely converge on the same definition and are better thought of as belonging on a spectrum.
Approaching hierarchy as an intersubjectively constituted (or maintained)Footnote 21 structure of inequality poses a deeper challenge to IR's anarchy-centered conception of world politics. First, it implies that hierarchies exist even more broadly in world politics (not just where there is legitimate authority). Second, it exposes a complicity in the first approach to hierarchy—that is, as a system of legitimate authority—with the notion that hierarchies exist more “naturally” at the domestic level than among sovereign equals. By contrast, in identifying systems of inequality as hierarchies, regardless of a basis in legitimate authority, hierarchy appears as an organizational form that intrinsically belongs at no particular level of human social life. In this sense, hierarchies are global: they can, in principle, cut analytically across and through the levels of analysis that have locked IR into an inter-state approach to world politics.
Critical approaches to IR have long been engaged in the project of identifying hierarchies, analyzing the logic and basis of their organized inequalities, and drawing out their implications for social, moral, and behavior logics of world politics. However, whereas scholars such as Cooley arrive at their project through empirical inquiry that reveals the inadequacy of an anarchy-centered conception of world politics, critical approaches never accept the legitimacy of that heuristic in the first place. Critical approaches begin by refusing the analytical value of the distinction between domestic and international spaces of politics and define hierarchy very broadly. Walker has argued, for instance, that this distinction obscures more than it reveals, naturalizing and masking the contingency and violence of the modern political project that organizes human subjects into national territorially defined communities.Footnote 22
In developing this line of thought, critical scholarship divorces itself from mainstream IR's alliance with the nation-state, freeing it to approach world politics through a hierarchy analytic without concern for tensions with sovereignty and anarchy. Wallerstein, for instance, takes the world economy rather than nation-states as his starting point of analysis.Footnote 23 This enables him to direct his attention not to the relations between states, but instead to the hierarchical organization of the world system into core and periphery; to the modes of cultural and economic power through which capital establishes and perpetuates that order; to the particular nature of the inequalities entailed by this organizational form; and to moral, social, and behavioral dynamics that follow from them. Others offer similarly hierarchy-centered stories about the organization of world politics and IR through systems of gendered, racial, geographical, and civilizational inequalities.Footnote 24 In each, the analysis begins not with sovereign states in anarchy but with systems of inequality, the particular machinations of which are then interrogated. This includes examining the concrete forms of power they entail (including but limited to legitimate authority); the variety of actors or “units” differentiated through them (including but not limited to states); and the ways in which the differentiation of those units constitutes the social, moral, and behavioral logics of world politics.
Insights from critical theories about hierarchy could be profoundly disruptive to the way IR conceptualizes world politics because they indicate that hierarchies are prior to and fundamentally constitutive of sovereign statehood. Anarchy, as such, is produced by hierarchy. Yet precisely because it is critical—that is, because it flat out rejects the validity of the discipline's orienting concepts—this line of research has been largely overlooked by the mainstream. A similarly hierarchy-centric message, however, is increasingly also being delivered by more critical strands of constructivist scholarship. This scholarship provisionally accepts anarchy and states as the analytical starting point to expose how hierarchical relations of social, economic, and political domination are necessary for and reproduced by the rhetoric of formal equality among states.Footnote 25 In this way, critical constructivist research indicates that any anarchic international political order is generated by prior hierarchical ones. Anarchy, it suggests, makes no sense without hierarchy.
In sum, most major IR approaches (materialist and ideational) contain arguments that either implicitly or explicitly call out the limitations of approaching world politics as an international anarchy. These challenges unfold in ways that suggest hierarchy is often a better analytical starting point. After all, it has only been in quietly supplementing frameworks that emphasize international anarchy with more hierarchy-oriented ones that researchers have begun to make headway on explaining the kinds of complex, “multi-centric” processes and relationships that characterize globalized world politics—for instance, multilevel governance and the existence of nonstate, private, and supranational authorities to which even states may be subordinate.Footnote 26 Clearly states are still central to world politics. But especially given globalizing dynamics, the question is how much more might be learned about world politics if scholars were to start with hierarchy, making anarchy a supplementary analytic? This question is forcefully raised by hierarchy-oriented research, which invites new modes of theorizing and analysis that begin with a new understanding of world politics. Reorientation along these lines invites us to envision world politics as a system of multiple, varied, internally differentiated systems of super- and subordination that include but are not limited to those among states. Hierarchy-oriented research, in other words, invites hierarchy-centered approaches to IR.
Obstacles to Moving Hierarchy to the Center
For a hierarchy-centered approach to prevail as a major strand of research in IR, a sufficient majority of scholars first need to recognize their shared interest in interrogating the analytic value and limitations of a hierarchy heuristic. This is already happening.Footnote 27 The second step is more difficult to achieve: researchers would need to go about interrogating the analytic value and limitations of a hierarchy heuristic by consciously (though not exclusively) fashioning their research in relation to and as an engagement with other research(ers) on hierarchy. The different understandings of hierarchy have stood in the way of this development.
From different conceptions of hierarchy follow different analyses of the relationship between hierarchy and power. For those using a broad definition discerning “the nature and variation in power relations between the superior and subordinate actors” is a critical part of the research endeavor.Footnote 28 At issue is how different forms of power—coercion, dominance, legitimacy, and so on—give rise to different kinds of hierarchies that have different kinds of effects on international politics.Footnote 29 For those working with a narrow understanding this analytic venture makes no sense at all. After all, for scholars hierarchies are defined by their basis in authoritative, consensual, or otherwise legitimate power. Accordingly, international political dynamics that manifest other forms of power—coercion or domination, for instance—ought not be approached through a hierarchy analytic at all. As Lake argues, anarchy and power balancing provide all the analytic leverage we need on most vertical arrangement in world politics.Footnote 30 The only arrangements that require a hierarchy analytic are those organized through authority relations. Indeed, researchers committed to narrow conceptions of hierarchy may find little reason to engage with research that has been guided by a broad conception, unless the particular hierarchy under investigation turns out to be constituted by legitimate authority. Conversely, researchers committed to broad views perceive narrow research on hierarchy as too narrow to capture the full range of dynamics, even in instances where legitimate authority is at work.Footnote 31
To compound the difficulties, neither the narrow nor broad conceptions provide sufficient common ground among their respective adherents to function as the basis for a coherent research endeavor.Footnote 32 Adherents to each conception are internally divided along theoretical and methodological lines such that there is no tidy alliance between researchers’ theoretical orientations and their conceptions of hierarchy. This further attenuates the possibility of mutual engagement around common research interests in super- and subordination. In Hierarchy in International Relations, Lake, for instance, marries a substantive conception of hierarchy to theoretical commitments that are generally liberal and rationalist.Footnote 33 Pouliot, in International Security in Practice, and Jabri in The Postcolonial Subject, also adopt narrow conceptions of hierarchy but without a liberal rationalist framework.Footnote 34 Quite the contrary, Pouliot theorizes hierarchy's significance through a Bourdieusian, or practice-oriented constructivism, whereas Jabri theorizes through a postcolonialist lens. When played out through these respective projects, it is rather difficult to discern any real overlap in shared research interest, despite the common narrow conception of hierarchy. Lake directs our analytical attention toward dynamics of functional differentiation, Pouliot toward differentiation by social capital or status, and Jabri to differentiation by race. In fact, Lake's analysis ultimately bears more resemblance to Ikenberry's in Liberal Leviathan or Nexon's Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, even though those both adopt broad conceptions of hierarchy. But here again, there are not clear alignments with theories. Although Ikenberry, like Lake, adopts a theoretically liberal/rationalist approach, Nexon deploys social network theory. In short, hierarchy-oriented research is transected by so many differences that simply recognizing it as such has been difficult.
We believe it is possible to overcome these divides. The narrow conception understands hierarchy as a particular kind of organizing principle, reflecting an intrinsically legitimate political order. The broad conception views hierarch(ies) as systems of vertical stratification, versions of which are constituted through distinct criteria for differentiation. Hence different hierarchies structure distinct kinds of political orders. Vertical stratification that is constituted through and reflective of an authorized, legitimate political order is one possibility. Just as analytically possible, though, is a hierarchical political order constituted through and reflective of domination. What ultimately unites both approaches is the idea that hierarchies require participation (or at least the awareness) of all actors in them—that is, that their structures are (at least partly) intersubjective orders. Understood this way, the different conceptions of hierarchy are not competing. Rather, the difference is one of focus. Those who work with the broader understandings of hierarchy can view the narrow conception as one type (which they may find uninteresting because it is too limited); likewise, those who work with the narrower understanding may similarly concede that their definition of hierarchy does not capture all forms (yet still maintain that it deserves to be the focus because of its empirical verifiability).
Three Logics of Hierarchy
We do not mean to suggest that there should be no divisions in the hierarchy research agenda; to the contrary, some clustering around major analytical poles is likely to be more productive in the immediate future. The existing research in fact coheres around three such analytically distinct but nonexclusive “logics of hierarchy.” A logic of hierarchy hereFootnote 35 refers to an account of particular features of hierarchical systems in terms of how they generate, produce, and otherwise create effects in, to, and of world politics. The first, the logic of trade-offs, focuses on the functional bargains encoded in hierarchies, which are thought to generate effects by alternatively incentivizing compliant and resistant behavior; the second, the logic of positionality, focuses on the material and/or social arrangements that characterize hierarchies with attention to the variety of positional or role-based behaviors they are understood to generate; and the third, the logic of productivity, focuses on the practical or performative ontology of hierarchies, which is understood to simultaneously produce distinctive political spaces and the varied actors and actions that populate and enact them. Although each logic is thus far implicit and relatively underdeveloped, the fact that each is already being advanced across the fragmented nonbody of hierarchy-oriented research indicates that conversation and contestation—that is, a shared research enterprise—can and should be pursued.Footnote 36
Hierarchy 1: A Logic of Trade-offs
The core proposition of the logic of trade-offs is that hierarchies affect outcomes through the particular way they structure choices that lead to action. Important to this logic is that hierarchies—and a given actor's position within a hierarchy—are understood to arise in the first place from bargained solutions to problems of order. Hierarchies, that is, are founded on exchanges in which actors trade degrees of freedom for a desired social or political arrangement. Accordingly, hierarchies institutionalize interests in that order and this distinctively affects actors’ incentives and disincentives, creating compliant and noncompliant outcomes.Footnote 37
Within IR, the best example of the logic of trade-offs is Lake's contract theory of hierarchies as expounded in Hierarchy in International Relations, discussed earlier as an example of scholarship that adopts a narrow understanding of hierarchy. Noting the general inattention of IR to the persistence of power asymmetries established through colonialism and alliances, Lake argues that such arrangements are best understood as authoritative institutions. They function, he argues, as (explicit or tacit) bargains in which subordinates give up rights to freedom in exchange for the provision of a social order that is valued by the subordinate. International hierarchies, in other words, are theorized as functional, intentional solutions to collective problems of global governance.Footnote 38 As “bargains between ruler and ruled premised on the former's provision of a social order of value sufficient to offset the loss of freedom,”Footnote 39 hierarchies uniquely structure incentives in ways that explain behavior of superordinate and subordinate actors alike.Footnote 40
In Liberal Leviathan, Ikenberry invokes a similarly contract-functionalist logic to explain both the US long-standing position as hegemon in the liberal international order and the current crisis of American hegemony. As Ikenberry explains it, American hegemony is “a hierarchical system that was built on both American power dominance and liberal principles of governance”Footnote 41 and that was “made acceptable to other states … because it provided security and other “system services.’”Footnote 42 With US authority no longer securely established, the liberal international order needs a new bargain through which to stabilize incentives and behaviors in world politics.Footnote 43
In Special Responsibilities, Bukovanksy et al. also treat hierarchies as functional bargains, though ones undertaken by international society as a whole rather than by individual states. Their account arises in the course of seeking to explain why international society has historically dealt “with major global problems” through the allocation of differentiated responsibilities—or hierarchies—among sovereign states.Footnote 44 They argue that hierarchies “come to the fore and assume particular political importance” in instances where neither the formal principle of sovereign equality nor political power struggle provides an adequate basis on which to address challenges of coexistence and cooperation.Footnote 45 In such instances, international society has allocated special responsibilities “to enhance the efficient working of international order.”Footnote 46 International society has promulgated hierarchies because they give incentives to superordinates and subordinates to support and conform to the order it values.
The logic of trade-offs has also been deployed to account for actors’ behavior within regional orders. Kang, for instance, has argued that the hierarchy that ordered East Asian international relations from 1368 to 1841 rested on an implicit bargain, in which Chinese authority was legitimated because China crafted the kind of Confucian-inspired social order that was generally valued by, and so conformed with, its subordinates.Footnote 47 Keene similarly turns to bargained hierarchy resting on a prior stock of shared culture in accounting for the EU's normative power. Normative power, suggests Keene, arises from a sort of authorized leadership in an international social club in which others are followers—that is, from a social hierarchy. Such a hierarchy, in turn, arises from a social bargain. The EU intentionally “construct[s] a distinctive identity and lifestyle”Footnote 48 that draws in a unique and exclusive way on the core social principles of international society and … establish[es] the EU as a model society to whose normative authority others implicitly consent to defer. Normative power, in this way, is explained at least partly by a logic of trade-offs.
There are significant differences between each of the hierarchy-oriented analyses represented in these examples. Most notable are differences in the bases of the hierarchy-constituting agreements. Kang and Keene see the bargains on which hierarchies are founded as authorized by the social appropriateness of the subordination, while Lake and Ikenberry focus on positive consequences of subordination. Bukovansky et al. highlight both positive consequences and social appropriateness. Despite their differences, however, these accounts converge on at least three key points. First, hierarchies are understood as legitimate orders in which superordinate and subordinate alike have some material, functional, and/or social interest in the arrangement. Each works, that is, with a narrow understanding of hierarchy. Second and following from the first, actors are understood (more and less) as purposeful agents of order.Footnote 49 Finally, and most importantly, the bargains encoded in hierarchies are understood to structure action, whether through social or interest-based incentives.
It is on this last point that a common research enterprise can be clearly discerned. From the logic of trade-offs follows the need to make sense of the distinctive matrix of (social and/or material) incentives created by hierarchies. Because the matrix varies for any given action (compliant, noncompliant, resistant, conciliatory, etc.) and with an actor's (superordinate or subordinate) role, the challenge is to specify the matrices as they pertain to differently positioned actors under varied conditions. The bulk of this research has focused on superordinate states, and in particular, the incentives they face to exercise self-restraint in spite of their right to govern through power as they see fit. Ikenberry and Lake each characterize these incentives in terms of the contingency of the dominant states’ authority on the buy-in of the superordinate, while Bukovansky et al. characterize them in terms of the norms of right action and the expectation of political accountability faced by superordinate power.Footnote 50 In any case, it is in this incentive for self-restraint, arising from the intersubjective or relational character of a legitimate order, that the value of this hierarchy heuristic becomes clear. Basically, this logic explains an aspect of unipolarity that could not be apprehended through balance-of-power theory.Footnote 51
In addition to research on the trade-offs facing superordinates, some attention has also been paid to the distinctive effects of (bargained) hierarchy on subordinates, as well as the conditions under which noncompliance, resistance, or undercompliance might emerge. With respect to subordinates, the matrix of incentives appears to encourage the delegation of responsibility for security—among other things—to superordinates.Footnote 52 With respect to noncompliant behavior, research has focused on the incentives for contestation arising from the rather visible inequalities that hierarchies entail.Footnote 53
Related to this line of research is a common concern with the internal dynamism of hierarchies. Bargained hierarchy rests on “relational authority” such that a superordinate's legitimacy depends on how well that actor delivers on the expectations of the role. But given that all actors in hierarchies face position-specific matrices of incentives, sustaining “an equilibrium among interests” is an ongoing process.Footnote 54 The implication is that whereas anarchy is understood as a given condition, or as deep structure, hierarchies, by contrast, are seen to be constantly subject to renegotiation as bargained orders. Hence, some research has considered the benefits of disequilibrium for creating flexible, durable orders. Conflicts of incentives generate productive tensions that change behavior and outcomes. This creates opportunities for a new bargain and a new equilibrium.Footnote 55 Other research however questions the extent to which these tensions are necessarily productive, considering how disequilibrium of interests can undermine legitimacy, provoke resistance, and even lead to the transformation of the hierarchical order.Footnote 56
Hierarchy 2: A Logic of Positionality
Although a logic of trade-offs proposes that hierarchies affect international politics by altering how actors go about pursuing their interests, a logic of positionality proposes that hierarchies do so by constituting or making salient to actors their particular position-contingent roles. Thus the content of what actors want and what is important to them depends in part on where they are positioned in a hierarchical order. Accounts of hierarchy along these lines have emerged through research in a variety of substantive areas: security,Footnote 57 foreign policy,Footnote 58 the influence of international relations on domestic politics,Footnote 59 diplomacy,Footnote 60 international law,Footnote 61 and even in research on IR scholarship itself.Footnote 62 Paul, Larson, and Wohlforth's Status in World Politics covers most of these areas as well.Footnote 63
Within IR there are many excellent examples of the logic of positionality, though this research tends to be more indirect about its hierarchy-orientation than the logic of trade-offs. Most of this vein of scholarship also operates with a broader understanding of hierarchy as (intersubjectively) organized inequality. Although the particular puzzles on which these research efforts are trained vary widely, there is a shared analytical focus on the socializing effects of hierarchies on the actors positioned within them. Whereas in the logic of trade-offs hierarchies appear as agent-constituted bargains that constrain and enable the pursuit of actors’ already-given interests, here hierarchies appear as extant features of the world political environment in which actors simply find themselves and which teach actors to play certain roles, including having certain interests and expectations (and are thus sustained by them).
Scholarship on the distribution of power and its impact on state behavior offers one important example of a logic of positionality as an approach to hierarchies. Because of its theoretical origins in balance-of-power studies, it is rare to see this scholarship directly connected to the notion of hierarchy. However, in its focus on systemic, vertical differentiation of power capabilities, this scholarship indirectly invokes the broad conception of hierarchy. In its focus on actors’ position-contingent interests and expectations, it points to a logic of positionality to explain outcomes in world politics. In characterizing the international system as a cycle of hegemony, challenge, war, and restabilization, power transition theory as discussed in Organski and Kugler, for instance, presupposes that actors are always already positioned within a durable structure of vertical differentiation and that different positions stimulate different kinds of interests—status quo, revisionist, and regional—for dominant, great, and middle powers, respectively.Footnote 64
A focus on the logic of positionality in hierarchies has also been used to explain outcomes that are unexpected through the “balance-of-power” theory. For instance, in their essay in Paul et al.'s Status in World Politics, Larson and Shevchenko argue that materially stratified hierarchies are just part of the story, for most of those hierarchies are also overlaid with a social hierarchy.Footnote 65 In such a social hierarchy, actors are positioned according to the level of status conferred on them by the social recognition of others. Social status matters for behavior, but precisely how it matters depends on positionality. Those with superior material positions tend to become socially competitive when those with inferior material positions have a higher status rank. Writing in a similar vein, Volgy and colleagues in the same volume reverse the story: social hierarchies matter much more for the behavior of those who are positioned lower down on a material hierarchy—like those who fall just short of great power standing.Footnote 66 In such cases improved social status is less costly to achieve and more attainable than great power standing.
Still others have argued that to fully understand the impact of social hierarchies on world politics, their logic of positionality and behavior-generating effects ought to be treated on their own, rather than fused analytically to positionality in material hierarchy. For instance, Bially Mattern argues that quite apart from material concerns, the status anxieties of the United States and Britain over their potential “unrecognition” as leaders of the West played a key role in the peaceful resolution of the Suez Crisis in 1956.Footnote 67 Onuf similarly emphasizes that hierarchy cannot be reduced to an order of material power, arguing that international relations are best thought of as heteronomous.Footnote 68
Just as with the logic of trade-offs, there are significant differences among the works that adopt a logic of positionality. Some study positionality effects in the context of material stratification, whereas others focus on the logic of social positionality. Though in principle there is nothing to preclude positionality approaches from adopting a narrow conception of hierarchy, most works in this vein work with a broad conception (though often not as broad as the one adopted by the logic of productivity discussed shortly). Although most work following a logic of positionality thus emphasizes the importance of structure, disagreements exist over the degree of agency actors enjoy within hierarchical systems. Despite their differences, however, these accounts converge on a number of points: that hierarchies are relatively durable; that an actor's position within a hierarchy is not (just) a choice or the result of a bargain; that an actors’ identity, role, interests and/or expectations are constituted by, or an effect of, their position in the system; and that it is through these socializing dynamics that hierarchies create effects in world politics.
Vibrant research is growing up around this common ground. For instance, a core area of inquiry regards which actors’ behaviors are most affected by hierarchy: those at the top, the bottom, or somewhere in between. Within this vein, research on social hierarchies (both in connection with and sometimes independent of material hierarchies) has developed particularly quickly, focusing especially on the intensity of socialization. Building on the idea that the impact of a hierarchy depends on socialization at the bottom, many have turned their attention to lower-ranking actors. In Women and States, Towns sees the desire to move up ranks as part of being socialized to lower rankings, and as a result, she is more optimistic about the possibility of upward mobility. This explains why policy diffusion can come from below.Footnote 69 For Adler-Nissen in Opting Out of the European Union, low-ranking agents are socialized enough to be negatively affected by their stigmatization, but not so socialized that they lack the agency to strive for change. By considering the conditions under which stigma would be managed by opting out, she uses the logic of positionality to consider how hierarchies may produce resistance as well as compliance.Footnote 70 Others see actors as having less ability to resist socialization to their position. For example, Zarakol argues in After Defeat that socialization of non-Western states (particularly former empires such as Turkey, Japan, and Russia) to the Western order after the nineteenth century, when coupled with defeat, created a desire in those actors to move up rank; yet the very act of having to fight stigmatization has led to behaviors that reproduce stigmatization and reinforce the hierarchy.Footnote 71 Drawing from an English School account and focusing on China and Japan, Suzuki in Civilization and Empire advances a similar view.Footnote 72 Authors who focus primarily on non-Western states are generally less optimistic about the possibility of upward mobility. Hobson and Sharman observe that status hierarchies can also socialize the powerful: “In the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries through to 1945/60 prevailing norms of great power status were grounded in racist norms which prescribed that a state is a great power when it can govern over large areas of land in the ‘inferior non-European world’ … The British (and others) engaged in imperialism not simply because they could. Rather they engaged in it because they believed they should.”Footnote 73 The British superior racial standing and superior power standing not only legitimated but required their superior political standing.
In sum, the logic of positionality connects hierarchies to action in world politics through the dynamics created by vertically differentiated status, material, ideational, or otherwise. Hence, whereas the logic of trade-offs suggests that hierarchies are created by actors as solutions to problems of order, the logic of positionality suggests that existing hierarchies (which may or may not have been purposefully created)Footnote 74 matter because they socialize actors to respond to positionally appropriate incentives.
Hierarchy 3: Logic of Productivity
With the logic of trade-offs, then, the emphasis is on agents and how they purposefully erect hierarchies as solutions to problems of order, with minimal attention paid to structures; by contrast, the logic of positionality emphasizes how hierarchical structures constrain or influence agent choices, behavior, and perceptions. The third logic, that of productivity, mutes the agency angle almost entirely in favor of structure. The core proposition implied by the logic of productivity is that hierarchy does not just shape the behaviors of actors in world politics, but rather produces both the actors and the space of world politics in which they act. Accordingly, the logic of productivity necessarily implies a broader understanding of hierarchy, even beyond what is found in most works that employ a positionality logic.
The feature of hierarchies most central to the logic of productivity is their practical, or performative, ontology. Approached as social practices, hierarchies are cultures-in-action that are materialized through bodily activity and discursive regimes.Footnote 75 The practice of hierarchies produces actors by surfacing them within their structure of differentiation as particular kinds of agents with particular capacities for action that belong, or do not, in some space of world politics. The practice of hierarchies, as such, produces the actors of world politics as well as their repertoires for action. But it also produces the boundaries that define who and what belongs where in world politics. In this way, a logic of productivity is bold in the stance that to study international politics inevitably is to study hierarchies.
Within IR, a logic of productivity is found most commonly in poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, and critical research, especially on borders. Starting from the premise that our worlds are produced through the discursive practices by which we make sense of them, Weldes et al. argue that borders—physical, territorial, conceptual/analytical, or collectively imagined—must be seen as sites of power, inequality and the practice of hierarchy.Footnote 76 Key to this claim about borders is that discursive practices—like all practices—are founded not on universal truths but on historically contingent knowledge structures (linguistic, bodily, tacit, explicit) that signify objects, subjects, and other phenomena by positioning them in relation to each other.Footnote 77 Discourses, thus, are forms of power; “regimes of truth” that dominate and violate by arbitrarily defining “the (im)possible, the (im)probable, the natural, the normal, what counts as a social problem;” and so, who is (im)possible, (im)probable, natural, normal, and problematic.Footnote 78 They bring social beings into being, as particular identities, with particular interests, that have particular agencies, or particular capacities to make themselves present to others—capacities that mark them as superior or inferior. The discursive practices of bordering, thus, inscribe spaces of inside (superior) and outside (inferior) by “making” the superior and inferior actors that populate them. For instance in Writing Security, Campbell argues that discourses that drive US foreign policy have produced “the boundaries of the identity in whose name it operates.” But at the same time it also produced the many dangers against which the US requires protection.Footnote 79 More recently, Barder has argued that international hierarchies, whether in the guise of imperialism or hegemony, have “historically resulted in the experimentation and innovation of various norms and practices that (re)shape the domestic space of various imperial or hegemonic powers.”Footnote 80 In Barder's account even domestic political outcomes in both the core and the periphery are produced by international hierarchies.
Given the importance of power-laden discourses in the practice of hierarchies and the logic of productivity, one focal point for researchers has been on disclosing the mechanisms of power through which particular discursive regimes of truth produce and naturalize hierarchies and the political inequalities that flow from them. In Simulating Sovereignty, Weber demonstrates how “the natural” fact of state sovereignty is produced and sustained through the ongoing performance of a constantly shifting discursive boundary between acceptable and unacceptable international interventions.Footnote 81 In a similar vein, Agathangelou and Ling show how the seemingly natural interest of states in clear borders and security are actually produced by hierarchical social relations centered on the boundaries of class, race, and gender.Footnote 82 In other words, even the most basic concepts of international politics are normalized reflections of the structures of inequality in everyday life.
Another focus within the logic of productivity has been the kind of subjectivities produced by hierarchies. Given that “identities are always constituted in relation to difference because a thing can only be known by what it is not,” it follows that “subjectivity … produces its own exteriority as object.”Footnote 83 Since these discursive formations define the things that can be said and therefore constitute actions and social reality as a whole, subjectivity appears stable. The implication is of being locked into and perpetually reproducing the discourse by which one is produced. This has led to a concern in this literature with ethics as well as with the lived experience of different perspectives.Footnote 84
It is not just critical approaches, however, that see hierarchy as a productive force in international political life. Any theory that accepts formal anarchy among states as a defining feature of international politics implicitly presupposes the productive effects of hierarchies. After all, it is only through the distinctive hierarchical relation of states to their territorially bounded societies that they emerge as sovereign actors and that the formally anarchic space of international politics comes into being.Footnote 85 Inasmuch as one acknowledges the productive effects of domestic hierarchy for creating the international, it is also logically consistent to consider the productive effects of hierarchies on international life, and world politics more broadly. Perhaps the failure among IR scholars who do not subscribe to thick constructivist assumptions to appreciate this explains why the implications of productive hierarchies are even more understudied than others. Implied though a logic of productivity may be in many mainstream IR theories—especially Waltzian neorealism—the sociological and political distance has surely impeded the emergence of any latent common research enterprise around this account of hierarchy.
Toward a Hierarchy Agenda
Our discussion demonstrates that it is possible to pursue a meaningful research agenda focused on the effects of hierarchies in world politics. Bringing the three logics of hierarchy into contact with each other suggests the most promising paths forward. Globalized world politics unfolds among a multiplicity of actors and plays out through multiple processes across multiples scales of aggregation. This complexity, combined with the growing distaste of most IR scholars for overly simplified theories, has led to a decline in systemic theorizing about world politics.Footnote 86 Along with it has been the demise of an integrated and shared (if disputed) understanding among IR scholars of how world politics is organized. Hierarchy-centered approaches to world politics contain within them a path toward systemic theories that can accommodate global complexity.
First, as is evident from the application of hierarchy-oriented research to nonstate actors and processes, all three logics of hierarchy are just as applicable to nonstate actors as to statesFootnote 87 and at all scales of aggregation. What is more, whereas studies of nonstate actors that begin with the international/anarchy imaginary add these actors into a state-based system that is already whole without them, the logic of hierarchical systems derives from their constitutive principle for stratification—not from the putative likeness of the units.Footnote 88 Second, because each logic of hierarchy analytically captures different processes, dynamics, and forms of power, taking them together increases the leverage on the complex, multifaceted processes by which globalized world politics unfold. In other words, the logics of trade-offs, positionality, and productivity ought not be treated as mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary, the limitations of each logic gesture for their resolution back to the others. The suggestion, thus, is that the logics are nested, layered, overlapping, or otherwise linked within or across hierarchies. Sustained inquiry into the nature of the linkages among the three logics is the first step toward a coherent systemic account of how globalized world politics is organized.
Consider first the logic of trade-offs. Although this logic gestures toward a connection between the origins of hierarchies and hierarchies’ effects on choice and action in world politics, the connection is far from clear. How exactly do hierarchies create the trade-offs that (later) shape behavior? The significance of exogenous conditions for the matrix of incentive structures facing any given actor is undertheorized.Footnote 89 Some research has shown that the incentives for superordinate self-restraint vary significantly depending on such factors as domestic regime type and system polarity.Footnote 90 Also in need of further study are the origins and effects of particular incentives. Hierarchies, broad and narrow, intersect with each other such that most actors are positioned within many overlapping hierarchies at the same time. In a world of such heterarchy—multilevel and nested hierarchical arrangements where authority is dispersed across different superordinates—behavior may be driven more by the interaction of incentives across hierarchies rather than within them. Addressing the question of how hierarchies matter also requires facing up to the possibility that the matrix of incentives (or at least some significant portion of it) preexists the emergence of bargains rather than arising out of them. A possible indication is that hierarchies do not create the matrix of incentives that confront actors; they merely reflect them. Bargained hierarchies may often merely institutionalize exchanges of order for freedom. To demonstrate that hierarchy matters for world political behavior would require demonstrating that hierarchies generate new incentives for behavior and action.Footnote 91 Hence, for instance, Bukovansky et al. suggest that hierarchies also have generative effects in producing authoritative social actors and endowing them with social power that did not preexist the hierarchy. But it is hard to make sense of how this could be so if hierarchies are functional, interest-based bargains that reflect preexisting conditions. It is in realizing this, perhaps, that Bukovansky et al. gesture tentatively toward the other logics of hierarchy. In doing so, they signal key links that merit exploration.Footnote 92
The logic of positionality has much to offer for developing structuralist research in IR, especially because of its sensitivity to historical and geographical differences. When it comes to specifying the conditions of movement within hierarchies, however, this line of analysis could benefit from a deeper engagement with theories of agency, both as found in the logic of trade-offs but also elsewhere, like psychology. Indeed, the lack of attention to psychology is surprising given that this literature is making a very substantive set of claims about human drives (such as status-seeking). It needs to take more seriously the ways in which agents participate in the creation and maintenance of hierarchical structures. Another avenue for further consideration are the implications of hierarchy-influenced behavior for stability and change in world politics. Although on the one hand this logic suggests that hierarchies stimulate agency and change as actors try to move up, on the other hand it also suggests that hierarchies stimulate dynamics that play on and reinforce dynamics of differentiation. In this way, hierarchy begets hierarchy, and to escape from one hierarchy requires the erection of another one. Just as Waltz offered no way out of anarchy, this line of reasoning offers no way out of hierarchy. The core insight seems to be that hierarchy always matters. Hence, like anarchy, it really never matters much. The challenge then becomes explaining why any variation in behavior exists. Some scholars accept that hierarchy is everywhere and would prefer to focus on distinguishing between better and worse hierarchies. But many leave open the possibility of hierarchy's collapse. Interests, identity, drives, and desires can change, so it remains theoretically possible that the dynamics touched off by hierarchy can be disrupted. Hierarchies can break down where their initial conditions (the desires of actors) vary; and this will result in a different evolution of the system's trajectory. This is implied in the idea that given the right circumstances peasants, workers, racial minorities, etc. will revolt. But what are those circumstances? To understand what difference hierarchy makes is what we need to understand—as with the logic of trade-offs—how much hierarchy matters relative to other factors in stimulating the drives to action.
The logic of productivity, aligned as it generally is with a nonpositivist epistemology, raises significant insights about the variety of forms and mechanisms of power as well as the importance of process to the workings of hierarchies. These are often overlooked by the logics of trade-offs and positionality. Yet, precisely because of its emphasis on human social practice and insistence on the arbitrariness of the foundations of knowledge, discourse, practice, and hierarchies, the logic of productivity implies an ironic sort of (over-)determinism and stasis. Inasmuch as hierarchies produce the actors within them, they also determine their capacities for action—from deep-seated unconscious drives and desires, to tacit habituated knowledge, to conscious identities and interests. Hence, as Butler notes, it is unclear how agents have the capacity to act apart from or against the hierarchical structures that produce them and their particular positions within it. They are subject to it.Footnote 93 The suggestion is that scholars should probe more deeply into the interiorizing dynamics of socialization rather than eschewing psychology because it is methodologically difficult.Footnote 94 What makes this so important is that in the absence of insights into the lapses in socialization, the problem of determinism arising from hierarchies’ productive power remains.
Not only does this sit uncomfortably with the emphasis on process and contingency but it is far from clear that actors do more than just reproduce the hierarchies that produce them. Just as structural realists tried to account for deviations by paying analytical attention to the varied forms of agency that emerge when the logic of a domestic hierarchy becomes intertwined with the logic of material hierarchy under anarchy (that is, neoclassical realism, two-level games) so have those interested in productive hierarchies in world politics taken up the question of how overlapping and networked hierarchies create dissident agencies. For instance, Rumelili notes in reference to the EU that not all difference can be readily rendered exterior, for hierarchies thrive on clear distinctions that can be difficult to reproduce in a multiperspectival polity that is itself constituted through competing discourses. The result is that some subjects are produced as liminal, slipping back and forth across the boundary between identity and difference in ways that are potentially disruptive to hierarchies.Footnote 95 Turning a similar insight into a quasi-auto-ethnographic reflection, Muppidi makes an argument about his own non-Western subjectivity as a professor of IR—though one that is perhaps less optimistic about the potentially transformative effects of liminality.Footnote 96 In these accounts of varying agency and roles, the logic of productivity gestures back toward other logics of hierarchy.
Logics of hierarchy comparison chart
In short, the shortcomings of each logic gestures back to the others for a solution. Though the precise nature of the links among the logics requires careful examination, the indication is nonetheless clear that they can be taken together (or at least coexist) to inform theorizing and empirical research on world politics as a global system.
Conclusion
The hierarchy-centered research agenda that we have sketched in this review essay is organic to the discipline, latent already within so much IR scholarship. Yet, we fear that that there remains a considerable obstacle to the development of the kind of active, self-conscious enterprise we have proposed. The problem is not conceptual disarray (which can be negotiated) or logical complexity (which can be parsed). The problem is that scholars, as people, may be too socialized to the political project of the nation-state to systematically engage with a world of politics that is not always neatly organized into discrete domains of domestic and international.
Our individual socialization to the nation-state manifests professionally in a number of ways, above all in the fact that anarchy, understood as a condition of the relations between sovereign nation-states, has been made to be the defining feature of IR as a discipline even though it is of relatively new vintage in world politics. Although IR scholars trace anarchyFootnote 97 back to the discipline's foundational texts, it is more accurate to say they have read it back onto those texts. Waltz, for example, claimed that Thucydides's history represented “an early recognition of the ‘anarchic character of international politics,’ which ‘accounts for the striking sameness of the quality of international life throughout the millennia.’”Footnote 98 Others have similarly interpreted Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.Footnote 99 But none of these supposed precursors talk about anarchy in the way that contemporary IR scholars mean it.Footnote 100 When Thucydides talked about civil war, he was describing a world where the enemy is seen as part of the same community rather than another sovereign; when Hobbes likened the relations between states to kings standing in the posture of gladiators, he used the metaphor to conjure a much more formalized setting (with its codes of fighting, weaponry, salutes, etc.) than the nasty, brutish, and short existence that described individuals surviving in the state of nature. But IR scholars have seized on the latter in constructing the history of anarchy. In using the concepts and metaphors they did, authors such as Thucydides and Hobbes could not help but convey certain common understandings of their time. But as scholars of our time, we have grafted our understandings onto their terms. Those understandings—of sovereigns ungoverned—emerged only at the turn of the twentieth century, alongside the disciplines of Political Science and IR.Footnote 101
It is no accident that IR scholarship reflects the particular understanding of world politics (or interpolity relations) that it does. The particular way we conceptualize relations between polities has much to do with how we perceive the polity itself. But perception of polities as bounded communities (or as “states”) is a distinctly modern invention. It was not until the Renaissance that “man and state for the first time came to be thought of as independent and self-directing entities.”Footnote 102 It was not even until the early nineteenth century that “rule came to be defined exclusively in terms of territories with boundaries between homogenous spatial authority claims.”Footnote 103 It would have been inconceivable for most of human history to think of polities in terms of territorial continuity, unitary rational agency, or as existing in an anarchy. Indeed, the conception of the state that our discipline takes to be universal is so historically contingent and so far removed from practical reality that it has only ever been actualized for brief moments in history.Footnote 104
The same processes that gave rise to Political Science and IR—the project of modern statecraft—also make it possible (and attractive) to think of world politics as only an inter-state anarchy. Fearing the possibilities of an oppressive world state or the fragmentation implicit in neofeudal scenarios, perhaps we instinctively sense that the domestic-international dichotomy provides some theoretical protection from worse worlds. Alternatively anarchy may be attractive as a concept because it masks the intractable inequalities of the modern order. Focusing on the anarchic nature of the international system arguably obscures the conditions of inequality in the world, making it difficult to talk about even the political hierarchies that are not explicitly formalized, let alone economic or social inequalities.
We emphasize possible reasons for the discipline's attachment to anarchy beyond its explanatory power not because we think anarchy has no utility as a concept but because we believe it has been a jealous god in demanding our attention. Hierarchy-centrism does not necessitate abandoning the concept of anarchy altogether, any more than trying to understand the dynamics of our vast universe requires astronomers to deny the importance of the sun altogether. The undeniable changes in world politics—from the rise of nonstate actors to global protests to erosion of state power—are making it increasingly harder to ignore cross-cutting global hierarchies that were always there anyway. It is time that we take hierarchy seriously.
