This article investigates the existing international hierarchy employing expert survey as its primary method. 'Authority hierarchy' and 'power status hierarchy,' the two existing research traditions of hierarchy studies, are briefly introduced. We demonstrate a gap between basic research on power status, emphasizing its social nature, and applied case studies, primarily relying on purely material indicators of a country's capabilities, such as the GDP and CINC. In times of rapid hierarchical shifts, there is a need for a more nuanced and holistic approach. The article suggests placing hierarchy studies onto the ontological foundation of Niklas Luhmann's Differentiation Theory to overcome these problems. We trace the international society's segmentary differentiation, stratificatory differentiation (status hierarchy), and functional differentiation (specialization). The paper argues that the functional roles of states and their positions in the international hierarchy are interconnected. The hierarchy of states' roles, resulting from functional differentiation, is understood in terms of authority hierarchy. In order to lay the ground for further research, three valuable insights of states in the international hierarchy. Firstly, we categorize 26 countries as belonging to one of the power status categories (small power, middle power, great power, superpower) as of autumn 2021 based on the survey results. We calculate indices operationalizing power, roles, public goods provision, and revisionism for the states in the survey. Secondly, the paper presents experts' evaluations of the importance of various valued attributes (such as the size of the economy, military might, international prestige, autonomy, etc.) for different power status categories. Thirdly, we suggest a novel approach linking a country's position in the international hierarchy to its functional roles. We use correlation analysis to test the hypothesis and compare the roles index to other popular power status indicators.
This article reviews the key topics and debates in Hegemony and World Order: Reimagining Power in Global Politics(Routledge, 2020), edited by P. Dutkiewicz, T. Casier, J. A. Scholte. The volume covers several issues related to hegemony in contemporary politics from neo-liberal, realist, constructivist, neo-Gramscian, world-systems and postcolonial theoretical perspectives. The concept of “complex hegemony,” briefly evaluated in this review, and the analysis of the recent stage of globalization presented in the volume offer meaningful contributions to the theoretical debates. From a more practical perspective, Hegemony and World Order dwells on the future of world order and the prospects for alternative hegemonic projects, including those sponsored by China and Russia. Additionally, the hegemony of non-state actors in global governance is studied in detail. The review considers the ability of the leading states to execute complex hegemony and discuss the demand for hegemony in the context of the transformation of world order.
This article examines the shift in the balance of power in Central Asia in the context of the United States' declining global hegemonic power. The authors analyze the hegemonic struggle between China, Russia, and the U.S. in Central Asia and its influence on the middle power formation in this region. The authors argue that although Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have high economic potentials, by certain criteria they have not achieved the status of middle powers yet. "Middlepowermanship dilemma" is formulated to explain why a hegemonic order has not been established in Central Asia and why middle powers have not emerged in the region.
Climate politics forms a subsystem of world politics. In this subsystem, states are differentiated by their ambitions to decarbonize their economies. These ambitions proceed from national policies and the nationally determined contributions (NDC) submitted by states in accordance with the Paris Agreement. Based on states’ climate ambitions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) produce multiple reports ranking states and evaluating their contributions. The main parameter of state differentiation by climate ambition is the expected year of achieving carbon neutrality. In 2019–20, the UK and the European Union (EU) promoted this parameter with the Green Deal, and eventually other metrics were overshadowed. The previously used climate parameters and rankings based on them were contradictory and depended heavily on the chosen methodology. Apart from being untrustworthy, they put some western countries in unfavourable positions. N. Luhmann’s new systems theory identifying “carbon neutrality” is taken as the main code of the climate communication subsystem that differentiates the climate subsystem of world politics from other functional subsystems. In this review article, how the emerging code of carbon neutrality is used by states and international organizations to form a new hierarchy in international relations is examined. Various constructivist and normative theories, from Foucault’s poststructuralism to the historicism and normativity of the English School, are applied in order to capture the possible implications of the political use of carbon neutrality for international relations. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential prospects of climate politics hierarchization for power redistribution in international relations.
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