Research Program
I study the changing institutional foundations of international stratification. In particular, I explore how a normative commitment to equality and equivalence is compromised by institutional forms whose declared purpose is to express and enforce reciprocity. My work stands in contrast to progressive narratives of equalization that chronicle a secular decentralization of power or a discursive shift to anti-hierarchical ideologies of rule.
I capitalize on the network-analytic distinction between content (the rules by which actors do or do not relate to one another) and form (the pattern of relations that emerges when a particular set of rules is generalized in practice). My article manuscripts build a typological theory of imperialism, multilateralism, and leadership as hierarchical institutional forms in and through which governments make reciprocal claims on each other's resources, peacefully as well as violently. Taken together, these articles develop the argument that regardless of how governments seek to formalize the rule of reciprocity, the resulting institutional order will betray that rule. My book manuscript emplots this argument in a series of tragic analytic narratives that span key order building moments from the late 19th century to the present.
Keywords: international institutions, global governance, multilateralism, imperialism, hierarchy, reciprocity, networks, social theory, analytic narrative
Article Manuscripts
Hierarchy, Anarchy, and the Incomplete Network Turn in International Relations.
IR scholarship on networks has crystallized in three stylized facts: (1) weak global cohesion due to local clustering of international relations, (2) widespread relational imbalances, (3) and positional inequalities among key actors. These findings strike at the core of conventional structural theory, but they have yet to command sustained attention. Why? Conventional wisdom oscillates between a view that network theory is an oxymoron and a view that network theory has been poorly translated into the going concerns of IR theory. This paper dismisses the former view by arguing that network theory is a poorly specified structural theory from and of the middle. And it clarifies, second, what type of translation network theory calls for. I introduce a distinction between two ways of practicing network theory: as abstraction and as de-idealization. Whereas existing structural theory in IR is premised on the idea of abstracting sameness from difference, network theory calls for the opposite: to recover the real differences that our universalizing categories such as “state,” “great power,” and “multilateralism” obscure. I develop and illustrate the implications of practicing network theory as de-idealization by refining canonical accounts of hierarchy and anarchy as idealizations of international stratification.
Multilateralism: The Missing Anatomy of an Institution.
Although multilateralism has been treated as the central organizing principle of international relations since World War II, its constitutive rules of equality and equivalence are rarely enacted. Conventional wisdom resolves this puzzle by theorizing the superior merits of bilateralism as a vehicle for realizing collective interests. The presumption of a collective interest leaves the conventional wisdom unable to explore order building by great powers. Why is it that great powers, interested in entrenching their preponderant status, rarely pursue multilateralism? This paper draws on network theory, in particular its distinction between reciprocal, anti-reciprocal, and incidentally reciprocal ties, to distinguish multilateralism, imperialism, and leadership as networked orders. It then derives multilateralism's distinct benefit: the resulting network is robust, because it is characterized by a high density of relations as well as high reachability among member states. Great powers rarely face a strategic situation in which they prefer multilateralism's robustness over the enduring control provided by imperialism and leadership, however. I illustrate this argument by challenging conventional readings of the crucial case of U.S. and Soviet strategies vis-à-vis Europe during and after World War II.
The Enduring Relational Logic of "Leading from Behind."
Most scholars of contemporary U.S. foreign policy argue that the Obama administration has changed, for better or worse, how the United States exercises leadership in the world. During the 2011 intervention in Libya, a strategy of “leading from behind” was born and generalized into an Obama Doctrine. In their common focus on judging outcomes of very complex and still unfolding geopolitical processes, critics and proponents alike take for granted that Libya marks a watershed moment for how the U.S. coordinates the use of military force. In this article, I return to the Libya episode to extract a generic relational logic by which a preponderant power and her allies together authorize the joint deployment of military assets. I draw on network analytics to argue that Libya illustrates a so-called gatekeeping logic of U.S. leadership. I conceptualize gatekeeping as a two-stage process: Prompted by an international crisis, two or more governments petition the executive of a preponderant power to intervene with them and on their behalf. Once these governments escalate their demands by credibly committing relevant assets to a joint operation, the preponderant power’s executive decides whether or not to reciprocate with assets of her own. As gatekeeper to the country’s formidable military capabilities, the executive calculates the expected value of committing these assets, and is constrained by the magnitude of commitments they have already made. Driven by a relational logic I call incidental reciprocity, my argument about gatekeeping explains what makes Obama’s Libya policy distinct yet commonplace at the same time. By generalizing conventional accounts of Obama’s foreign policy to a network model of U.S. leadership, I am also able to trace its operating logic in select intervention episodes during the Bush 43 and Clinton administrations.
BOOK PROJECT
Hierarchy After Empire: The Betrayal of Reciprocity in a Global Society of States
<Abstract forthcoming>