Journal of International Political Theory

In this introduction to the Special Issue, we undertake a little ground clearing in order to make room in International Relations for thinking differently about anarchy and world politics. Anarchy’s roots in, and association with, social contract theory and the state of nature has unduly narrowed how we might understand the concept and its potential in International Relations. Indeed, such is the consensus in this regard that anarchy is remarkably uncontested, considering its centrality to the field. Looking around, both inside and outside International Relations, for alternative accounts, we find ample materials for helping us think anew about the nature of and possibilities for politics in anarchy. In the second part of the introduction, we show how our contributors develop and expand on these resources and what we hope the Special Issue brings to International Relations.

Anarchy and hierarchy are two central concepts of International Relations theory but as conventionally defined they cannot describe political life for most of Western history. Neither concept describes the structure of medieval politics well. Rather, many different principles of differentiation existed simultaneously, both stratificatory and segmentary. The situation was closer to anarchy as understood as the absence of overarching principles of order rather than as ‘anarchy’ in the conventional sense used in international relations and absence of government. The power of the Popes over temporal rulers was considerable, but it never corresponded to the concept ‘hierarchy’ as conventionally understood either. Between c. 700 and c. 1300, Europe became more heteronymous as time went by, not less. More principles of differentiation were developed, and both Popes and kings became more powerful. The reinvention of the papacy after the ‘Investiture Controversy’ (1075–1122) created a system of law and practices in which European monarchs and realms were embedded, but it did not create an all-powerful papacy.

This article investigates the role of ‘anarchy’ in state securitisation. First, we discuss state hierarchies’ struggle with active and reactive anarchic networks, theorising a state in existential crisis, which exploits anti-anarchist discourses to respond to network threats. In the second part, we illustrate with examples the use of fear of anarchy in hierarchical productive structures of securitisation. As an ‘antiproduction assemblage’, the state treats logics stemming from the ‘social principle’ as a repressed Real, the exclusion of which underpins its own functioning. The scarcity and fear resulting from state terror ensure responses to this structural violence by reactive networks, while paradoxically also exacerbating reactive tendencies within social movements. In the concluding part, we discuss visions of desecuritising society, breaking away from majoritarian logics of control and the coming of other worlds counterposed to the hierarchies producing and reproducing an eternal loop of state and network terror.

It is only in the early decades of the twentieth century that the “Hobbesian state of nature” and the “discourse of anarchy” came to be seen as virtually synonymous. In examining Hobbes’ international state of nature, this article rejects two common views. In one, International Relations is seen as a warlike “Hobbesian” anarchy, and in the other, Hobbes is regarded as the progenitor of Realism. Far from defending anarchy of states, Hobbes in fact constructs a largely ameliorative international arena.

Although David Mitrany’s international thought is not usually associated with the concept of the international anarchy, I argue that his analysis actually compares two forms of anarchical order. The first form is the order associated with the relations between states, while the second is his functional alternative to this order. The functional approach is anarchical in the sense that it remains an order without an orderer. In first analysing the dynamics and failings of the inter-state order, and then suggesting pragmatic process-orientated solutions to those failings, I argue that Mitrany follows a similar approach to his classical realist contemporaries.

This article argues anarchy is undertheorized in International Relations, and that the undertheorization of the concept of anarchy in International Relations is rooted in Waltz’s original discussion of the concept as equal to the invisibility of structure, where the lack of exogenous authority is not just a feature of the international political system but the salient feature. This article recognizes the international system as anarchical but looks to theorize its contours—to see the invisible structures that are overlaid within international anarchy, and then to consider what those structures mean for theorizing anarchy itself. It uses as an example the various (invisible) ways that gender orders global political relations to suggest that anarchy in the international arena is a place of multiple orders rather than of disorder. It therefore begins by theorizing anarchy with orders in global politics, rather than anarchy as necessarily substantively lacking orders. It then argues that gender orders global politics in various ways. It concludes with a framework for theorizing order within anarchy in global politics.

The category of anarchy is conventionally associated with the emergence of an autonomous discipline of International Relations (IR). Recently, Donnelly has argued that anarchy has never been central to IR (hierarchy is more weighty). His criticism targets not just concepts of anarchy but theories of anarchy and thereby expresses an anti-theory ethos tacitly accepted in the discipline. As a form of conceptual atomism, this ethos is hostile to structuralist and normative theories. This article aims to reinstate theoretical holism against conceptual atomism and to defend the enduring relevance of theories of international anarchy for IR. This is done by revisiting two classic, structuralist accounts of international anarchy articulated in Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (scientific structuralism) and Hedley Bull’s Anarchical Society (normative structuralism). It will be shown that both represent coherent theoretical ‘wholes’ which reveal a more complex relationship between anarchy and hierarchy than supposed by critics and which recognise the important connection between the structure of international anarchy (whose key players are states) and the value of freedom. The conclusion examines the prospects of normative theories of international anarchy and ‘anarchical’ freedom in a globalising world where state agency is being challenged.

In this article, I argue that contemporary theories of collective intentionality force us to think about anarchy in new and challenging ways. In the years since Wendt declared the state a person, the collective intentionality of groups has become the focus of important scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. But this literature will not sit easily with mainstream International Relations for two reasons. First, contemporary theories of collective intentionality are difficult to square with the idea that the personified state is an intentional agent, with first-person plural self-awareness and moral obligations. However, by contrast, the same theories make it eminently plausible for all sorts of other groups to be intentional, agential, moral persons and can tell us how states are constructed. In short, this set of theories radically pluralises and transforms standard political ontology while also accounting for common misperceptions. I push these insights further to argue that radical pluralisation suggests that anarchy may be the structural context for politics as such. What we know from mainstream International Relations theory is that politics without an orderer is well-ordered regardless. It may be time to recast these insights in order to demonstrate how complex pluralism is not chaos but anarchy.

Modern International Relations theory has consistently underestimated the depth of the problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border wars, and internally disaggregated and transnationally connected state actors, leads to a complex and multidimensional restructuring of the global, the local and the uneven connections in between. We ought to abandon the idea of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ once and for all. This does not remove the problem of anarchy but rather deepens it, involving multidimensional tensions and contradictions variously described as ‘functional differentiation’, ‘multiscalarity’, ‘fragmegration’, disparate ‘landscapes’, the ‘new security dilemma’ and ‘neomedievalism’. Approaching anarchy from the perspective of plural competing claims to authority and power forces us to think again about the nature of global order and the virtues of anarchy therein. Will the long-term outcome be the emergence of a more decentralised, pluralistic world order or a quagmire of endemic conflict and anomie?