Network Hierarchies: Nested Hegemonies and the Global-Regional Orchestration of Order in International Politics

This thesis investigates how networked hierarchies structure global and regional orders. This question unfolds in a twin research problem, which requires a combined solution. Firstly, it raises the question of how international hierarchies and international orders relate. Secondly, it inquires how global and regional orders connect and shape one another. Answering these questions, I contend, entails recasting both problems as part of the same relational ontology. I propose that both international orders and interstate hierarchies should be understood as social networks and that their formation and transformation is connected and shaped through a network of hierarchical relations among sovereign states. International hierarchies contain a vertical logic of mobilization that structures the production of international orders. Conceiving hierarchies as complex networks, it becomes possible to investigate how its structure connect multiple order building projects, tangling global and regional orders. This thesis thus advances the claim that global and regional orders are produced jointly by dynamics of network hierarchies. To investigate these dynamics, I proposed a revised multi-clustered structure of international hierarchies where peripheries are asymmetrically connected by local orchestrators that are simultaneously super- and subordinated. Seeing order as bounded by these multi-cluster network hierarchies allows one to unpack any international order as a bundle of nested and partially overlapping orders. In these global network hierarchies, regional hierarchies can be identified as clusters of hierarchical ties. I argue that the structural forms in which global and regional network hierarchies connect have implications for the construction of global and regional orders. To analyse those implications, I provide a typology of such forms and their structuring effects. I use quantitative network analysis to empirically map the network hierarchies evolving since the post-World War II period and investigate their role in structuring dynamics of global and regional order building.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• De Oliveira Paes, Lucas

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Zarakol Jajich, Ayşe

• International Relations Theory
• International Order
• Hegemony
• Hierarchy
• Regional orders
• Network Theory
• Network Analysis
• International Relations

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/0676fdd9-3666-474b-bbdd-7206cbff9798/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.68580

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/321460