Riassunto articolo sulle Hierarchies, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Relazioni Internazionali

Scarica Riassunto articolo sulle Hierarchies e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Relazioni Internazionali solo su Docsity! Hierarchies in World Politics – riassunto di Mattern e Zarakol 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. In recent years the range of scholarship in IR concerned with hierarchies has expanded considerably. ➔ hierarchies are a ubiquitous feature of international (that is, inter-state) politics; ➔ they generate social, moral, and behavioral dynamics that are different from those created by other arrangements. 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. 3 FEATURES OF HIERARCHICAL SYSTEM 1. the structures of differentiation at the core of hierarchical systems are deeply implicated with power. Hierarchical systems are thus intrinsically political. 2. In world politics, hierarchies stratify, rank and organize the relations not only among starts but also other kinds of actors as well. 3. 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, these logic can be nested. 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 intersubjectively constituted systems structured by vertical stratification, there is considerable divergence regarding which such orders count as hierarchies in world politics. Hierarchy conceptions in IR 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.’” 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. 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. Two kind of research in IR scholarship: one that discloses within world politics relations of legitimate authority that should only have analytical importance within domestic political relations [narrow conception]; 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 [broad conception]. Hierarchies as Legitimate authority: the narrow conception -theory associated with scholarship in the liberal tradition in IR theory. -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. -borders as meaningful containers of political authority; -they still need to pose research questions that draw attention to hierarchies within the international anarchy. -Another 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. Actors (state and non state) 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. 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; -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. -approaches that take a broad view of hierarchy rarely converge on the same definition and are better thought of as belonging on a spectrum. -deeper challenge to IR’s anarchy-centered conception of world politics: 1. It implies that hierarchies exist even more broadly in world politics (not just where there is legitimate authority). 2. 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. -Critical approaches begin by refusing the analytical value of the distinction between domestic and international spaces of politics and define hierarchy very broadly. 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. ➔ Hierarchy-oriented research 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. 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. 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