Why do leading actors invest in costly projects that they expect will not yield appreciable military or economic benefits? We identify a causal process in which concerns about legitimacy produce attempts to secure dominance in arenas of high symbolic value by investing wealth and labor into unproductive (in direct military and economic terms) goods and performances. We provide evidence for our claims through a comparative study of the American Project Apollo and the Ming Dynasty's treasure fleets. We locate our argument within a broader constructivist and practice-theoretic understanding of hierarchy and hegemony. We build on claims that world politics is a sphere of complex social stratification by viewing constituent hierarchies in terms of social fields. Our specific theory and broader framework, we contend, provide tools for understanding the workings of power politics beyond military and economic competition.

Many scholars now argue for deemphasizing the importance of international anarchy in favor of focusing on hierarchy – patterns of super- and subordination – in world politics. We argue that only one kind of vertical stratification, governance hierarchy, actually challenges the states-under-anarchy framework. But the existence of such hierarchies overturns a number of standard ways of studying world politics. In order to theorize, and identify, variation in governance structures in world politics, we advocate a relational approach that focuses on three dimensions of hierarchy: the heterogeneity of contracting, the degree of autonomy enjoyed by central authorities, and the balance of investiture between segments and the center. This generates eight ideal-typical forms: national-states and empires, as well as symmetric and asymmetric variants of federations, confederations, and conciliar systems. We argue that political formations – governance assemblages – with elements of these ideal types are likely ubiquitous at multiple scales of world politics, including within, across, and among sovereign states. Our framework suggests that world politics is marked by a heterarchy of nested and overlapping political structures. We discuss broad implications for international-relations theory and comparative politics, and illustrate our approach through an analysis of contemporary China and the evolution of the British ‘Empire’ in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Many researchers assert that p op ular culture warrants greater attention from international relations scholars. Yet work regarding the effects of p op ular culture on international relations has so far had a marginal imp act.

Core state powers continue moving to the centre of the European polity, yet a sense of collective identity among EU citizens remains fragile. We argue that participatory democracy at the European level is a missing element that might create a more robust collective identity in Europe. We examine the history of polity formation in the early American case to probe the link between collective identity and practices of democratic participation, focusing on contestation about the 1789 US Constitution and the creation of pan‐US political parties in the early 19th century. Everyday democratic practices helped both to represent and to constitute the nationalization of politics in the early USA, as it moved from being a de facto international organization to a unified polity. This suggests that practices of democracy may likewise help to generate a more robust collective political identity in the EU. The historical record makes clear, however, that these processes are often exclusionary, uncertain, and far from unidirectional.

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