Includes bibliographical references and index.

Laws and norms in the making of international hierarchies / David A. Lake -- Making empires : hierarchy, conquest and customization / Andrew Phillips -- Hierarchy and paternalism / Michael Barnett -- Revealing international hierarchy through gender lenses / Laura Sjoberg -- Against authority : the heavy weight of international hierarchy / Vincent Pouliot -- Hierarchy in an age of equality : micro-states and dependencies / J.C. Sharman -- Command and control? : hierarchy and the international politics of foreign military bases / Alex Cooley -- Leading authority as hierarchy among INGOs / Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong -- Are we 'lazy Greeks' or 'Nazi Germans'? : negotiating international hierarchies in the Euro crisis / Rebecca Adler-Nissen -- 'Delinquent gangs' in the international system hierarchy / Shogo Suzuki -- Beyond hierarchy / Jack Donnelly -- Why hierarchy? / Ay�se Zarakol.

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Globalizing processes are gathering increased attention for complicating the nature of political boundaries, authority and sovereignty. Recent examples of global financial and political turmoil have also created a sense of unease about the durability of the modern international order and the ability of our existing theoretical frameworks to explain system dynamics. In light of the inadequacies of traditional international relation (IR) theories in explaining the contemporary global context, a growing range of scholars have been seeking to make sense of world politics through an analytical focus on hierarchies instead. Until now, the explanatory potential of such research agendas and their implications for the discipline went unrecognized, partly due to the fragmented nature of the IR field. To address this gap, this ground-breaking book brings leading IR scholars together in a conversation on hierarchy and thus moves the discipline in a direction better equipped to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century.