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A growing number of scholars call for downgrading the centrality of international anarchy in international-relations theorizing in favor of a focus on hierarchy (Hobson and Sharman 2005; Lake 2009; Hobson 2014; Mattern and Zarakol 2016). But most forms of ‘international hierarchy’ pose no special problems for thinking of world politics as anarchical. ‘Hierarchy’ merely refers to any pattern of super- and subordination. Scholars already routinely place the ranking of states by status, economic roles, and military capabilities at the center of their scholarship (e.g. Lemke 2004; Towns 2009; Paul, Larson and Wohlforth 2014).
However, one form of hierarchy among and across political communities, that involving governance, does contravene the states-under-anarchy framework. We argue that such governance hierarchies are likely ubiquitous features of world politics. In this article, we present a toolkit to help scholars recognize the myriad forms such hierarchies may take. We contend that the common practice of identifying anarchical relations from conditions such as the existence of independent diplomatic relations among actors, the de jure or de facto presence of a right to exit formal and informal governance hierarchies, or the observation of power-political behavior rests on deeply problematic assumptions about how governance arrangements operate. Some relations among some actors likely do take on anarchical forms, but we think that much of the action in world politics occurs under conditions that Donnelly (2009, 64) terms heterarchic: involving ‘multiple, and thus often “tangled”… hierarchies.’
How can scholars incorporate variation in hierarchical, as well as anarchical, governance arrangements into international-relations theory? We argue for an explicitly relational account of governance – or political – structures (see Goddard 2009; Jackson and Nexon 2009; and McCourt 2016). Patterns of governance relations assemble to create overlapping and nesting political formations. These operate within, across, and among sovereign states (Mansbach and Ferguson 1996, 48–9). Moreover, we can parse these in terms of a limited number of ideal-typical forms: national-states and empires, as well as asymmetric and symmetric variants of federations, confederations, and conciliar systems. Real-world governance assemblages – both formal or informal and including those that characterize sovereign states – combine features of these ideal types. 1
This shift helps rectify a deep bias in international-relations and comparative-politics scholarship that helps perpetuate the states-under-anarchy framework. International-relations...