Scholars of world politics enjoy well-developed theories of the consequences of unipolarity or hegemony, but have little to say about what happens when a state's foreign relations take on imperial properties. Empires, we argue, are characterized by rule through intermediaries and the existence of distinctive contractual relations between cores and their peripheries. These features endow them with a distinctive network-structure from those associated with unipolar and hegemonic orders. The existence of imperial relations alters the dynamics of international politics: processes of divide and rule supplant the balance-of-power mechanism; the major axis of relations shift from interstate to those among imperial authorities, local intermediaries, and other peripheral actors; and preeminent powers face special problems of legitimating their bargains across heterogeneous audiences. We conclude with some observations about the American empire debate, including that the United States is, overall, less of an imperial power than it was during the Cold War.

In recent years, paradigmatic debates in International Relations (IR) have focused on questions of epistemology and methodology. While important in their own right, these differences have obscured the basic divide in the discipline between substantialism, which takes entities as primitives, and relationalism, which takes processes of social transaction as the basic building blocks of theory. We argue that while both approaches can be fruitful, theories of processes and relations are better suited to address certain questions, most notably those involving change in global politics. Drawing on work in International Relations, sociology and philosophy, we examine what such theories entail and discuss areas of research for which they are especially suited.

We live in a period of uncertainty about the fate of American global leadership and the future of international order. The 2016 election of Donald Trump led many to pronounce the death, or at least terminal decline, of liberal international order—the system of institutions, rules, and values associated with the American-dominated international system. But the truth is that the unraveling of American global order began over a decade earlier. Exit from Hegemony develops an integrated approach to understanding the rise and decline of hegemonic orders. It calls attention to three drivers of transformation in contemporary order. First, great powers, most notably Russia and China, contest existing norms and values while simultaneously building new spheres of international order through regional institutions. Second, the loss of the “patronage monopoly” once enjoyed by the United States and its allies allows weaker states to seek alternative providers of economic and military goods—providers who do not condition their support on compliance with liberal economic and political principles. Third, transnational counter-order movements, usually in the form of illiberal and right-wing nationalists, undermine support for liberal order and the American international system, including within the United States itself. Exit from Hegemony demonstrates that these broad sources of transformation—from above, below, and within—have transformed past international orders and undermine prior hegemonic powers. It provides evidence that all three are, in the present, mutually reinforcing one another and, therefore, that the texture of world politics may be facing major changes.

Concerns about the end of International Relations theory pivot around at least three different issues: the fading of the ‘paradigm wars’ associated with the 1990s and early 2000s; the general lack of any sort of ‘great debate’ sufficient to occupy the attention of large portions of the field; and claims about the vibrancy of middle-range theorizing. None of these are terribly helpful when it comes to assessing the health of International Relations theory. We argue that international theory involves scientific ontologies of world politics: topographies of entities, processes, mechanisms, and how they relate to one another. Understood this way, the state of International Relations theory looks strong: there is arguably more out there than ever before. Ironically, this cornucopia helps explain concerns regarding the end of International Relations theory. In the absence of a ‘great debate,’ let alone ways of organizing contemporary International Relations theory, this diversity descends into cacophony. We submit that three major clusters of international theory are emerging: choice-theoretic, experience-near, and social-relational. These clusters map onto two major axes of contention: (1) the degree that actors should be treated as autonomous from their environment; and (2) the importance of thickly contextual analysis. These disputes are both field-wide and high-stakes, even if we do not always recognize them as such.

This article outlines a field-theoretic variation of hegemonic-order theory — one inspired primarily by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. We argue that hegemony derives from the possession of a plurality of meta-capital in world politics; hegemons exercise “a power over other species of power, and particularly over their rate of exchange.” Recasting conventional hegemonic-order theories along these lines carries with it at least three advantages: it helps bridge the differences between realist and neo-Gramscian approaches to hegemony; it provides scaffolding for exploring the workings of hegemony and hegemonic ordering across different scales; and it better addresses the fact that hegemonic powers are enabled and constrained by international order itself. After reviewing some of the major variants of hegemonic-order theory, we explore Bourdieu’s understanding of hegemony and cognate concepts. We then elaborate on our field-theoretic approach, with examples drawn from US foreign relations and the Roman Empire. Finally, we provide a longer illustrative sketch in the form of a discussion of Roman ordering and its longue durée influence on social, political, and cultural fields in world politics.

American scholars routinely characterize the study of international relations as divided between various Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.” Although most international relations scholars have abandoned Kuhn’s account of scientific continuity and change, many utilize Lakatosian criteria to assess the “progressive” or “degenerative” character of various theories and approaches in the field. We argue that neither specific areas of inquiry (such as the “democratic peace”) nor broader approaches to world politics (such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism) deserve the label of “paradigms” or “research programmes.” As an alternative, we propose mapping the field through Weberian techniques of ideal‐typification.

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