Research

Book project

Images of Hierarchy

Historically marginalized actors are intensifying their resistance to long-standing hierarchies that have historically structured the liberal international order. Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia, far-right politicians, and even small island nations, are increasingly vocal in their contestation of these hierarchies. Against this contemporary backdrop, Images of Hierarchy asks: how do actors resist and contest international hierarchies? And how have such acts of resistance shaped international order historically?

Images of Hierarchy argues that actors in international relations do not just contest their own position within hierarchies; they also advance competing conceptions of how those hierarchies are constituted and organized in the first place. The book examines how actors propagate competing visions of the very architecture of international hierarchy—whether as a tripartite order distinguishing great, middle, and small powers; a binary divide between “haves” and “have-nots”; or a fundamentally flat system grounded in sovereign equality. Images of Hierarchy studies how actors have deployed these different visions throughout the history of modern international order. In doing so, it traces the effects of these competing visions of hierarchy on international order from the 1907 Hague Conference and the founding of the United Nations in 1945 to the campaign to create a New International Economic Order in the 1970s.

Images of Hierarchy reveals that some of the most fundamental features of contemporary international order are not simply the product of top-down design, but of resistance and contestation “from below.” It also challenges the view that current efforts to reshape global order are historically novel. Contemporary actors—from China to transnational far-right movements—draw on and repurpose long-standing images of hierarchy that have circulated throughout modern international society. Their objectives may indeed be historically specific, but the conceptions of hierarchy they mobilize to pursue these goals are anything but new.