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Globalization and the rise of integrated world society: deterritorialization, structural power, and the endogenization of international society

November 2019
International Theory 11(03):293–317

DOI:10.1017/S1752971919000125

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Malmö University

There is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan’s (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.

Principles of legitimacy and differentiation in international and world society

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ARTICLE

Globalization and the rise of integrated world

society: deterritorialization, structural power,

and the endogenization of international society

Salvatore Babones1and John H. S. Aberg2*

Department of Sociology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia and

Department of Global Political

Studies, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

*Corresponding author. Email: john.aberg@mau.se

(Received 29 November 2018; revised 24 March 2019; accepted 1 July 2019)

Abstract

There is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has

or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory.

Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its

potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely

been raised. We build on Buzan’s (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’world society

(‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration

of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan

(2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political

economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six

dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political,

economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests

that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating

steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national

societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in

effect the ‘central state’of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within

integrated world society.

Keywords: world society; english school; power; international society; globalization; networks

Introduction: evolving conceptualizations of world society

Globalization has changed the human world in myriad ways, but it has done rela-

tively little to change international relations theory’s focus on the state. After all,

‘national’is in the very name of the discipline. At its core, international relations

theory is still ‘an area of study concerned with the interrelationships among states

in an epoch in which states, and most commonly nation-states, are the principal

aggregations of political power’(Cox, 1981, 126). Like other contemporary

approaches to international relations, the ‘English School’approach associated

Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

International Theory (2019), 11, 293–317

doi:10.1017/S1752971919000125

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with Bull (1977), Wight (1977,1992), and Buzan (2004,2014a) tends to be onto-

logically state-centric (Devlen, James, and Ozdamar, 2005, 176), yet English School

scholars have long sought to supplement the study of the international system of

competing states with the study of a ‘second-order’society of states under the

rubric of ‘international society’(Buzan, 2014a,12–15). This research program is

now well-developed and intellectually well-elaborated, and has entered the main-

stream of the discipline (Buzan, 2004,2014a).

English School scholars have also pioneered the theorization of ‘world society’in

international relations. In its English School conceptualization, world society is not

a second-order society of societies but a first-order society of individual human

beings (Buzan, 2014a, 15) that, together with the international society of states,

constitute a whole society of human institutions (Albert and Buzan, 2013). The

English School understanding of world society is similar to that pioneered by

Meyer et al.(1997) and the ‘Stanford School’in sociology, who characterize

world society as ‘stateless’(145, 169) and ‘mainly made up of what may …be called

‘rationalized others’: social elements such as the sciences and professions …that

give advice to nation-state and other actors about their true and responsible nat-

ures, purposes, technologies, and so on’(162). Buzan ranks world society among

the core concepts of the English School, maintaining that ‘the foundation of

English School theory is the idea that international system, international society

and world society all exist simultaneously,’but in Buzan’s view, ‘world society

has been the Cinderella concept of English School theory, receiving relatively little

attention and virtually no conceptual development’(Buzan, 2004,10–11). He

emphasizes that ‘if, as many people think, the world society element is rising in sig-

nificance, this neglect becomes untenable’(Buzan, 2004,10

–11).

If that was true then, it is even more true now. Four decades ago, Cox (1981, 149)

already saw in the ‘internationalization of production’the ‘prospect for a new

hegemony being based upon the global structure of social power.’Today, such global

structures of social power are thick on the ground, yet international relations theory

continues to underappreciate their potential to influence the structure of inter-

national society and the international system. As Buzan (2004, 11) suggests, in the

pre-globalization era it may have been reasonable for international relations theory

to treat world society as a ‘residual element in the background.’No longer. If Bull

(1977, 279–280) could admit forty years ago the importance of ‘the development

of global communications creating an unprecedented degree of mutual awareness

among different parts of the human community,’then how much more is this true

today? Bull (1977, 280) doubted that the level of global ‘interdependence’fostered

by the communication networks of the 1970s was sufficient to support a true

world society, but the social web, free global telecommunications, mass immigration,

and frequent air travel seem to have put paid to that notion. In the twenty-first cen-

tury, the technical feasibility of world society, if not already assured, soon will be.

Though understandings of world society in international relations are multifari-

ous and contested, we think it is useful to turn to Bull’s account in The Anarchical

Society as a touchstone, both because it is so widely known and because it predates

the globalization era. It thus represents a kind of theoretical vision of world society

from a time before world society became a practical everyday reality in all our lives.

Whatever degree or amount of world society that existed in 1977, more of it exist

294 Salvatore Babones and John H. S. Aberg

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today. Bull (1977) classically sought to give shape to the concept of world society by

way of analogy to the better-established concept of international society:

‘By a world society we understand not merely a degree of interaction linking all

parts of the human community to one another, but a sense of common inter-

est and common values on the basis of which common rules and institutions

may be built. The concept of world society, in this sense, stands to the totality

of global social interaction as our concept of international society stands to the

concept of the international system’(Bull, 1977, 279).

Here Bull argues that for world society to be taken seriously it must in some

sense shape the behavior of individuals in global interaction networks in the

same way that the international society of states shapes the behavior of states in

the international state system. World society, thus construed, could then be

observed in the emergence of ‘common interest and common values’that could

form the basis for the development of ‘common rules and institutions.’Parsing

Bull’s presumably unintentional but nonetheless highly influential test for the dis-

covery of world society, one might look for evidence of (1) global interaction net-

works that (2) align people’s interests and values in ways that (3) give rise to shared

values and institutions.

In this paper we build on Bull’s prescient insights from the pre-globalization era

to attempt to fit empirical slippers to Buzan’s Cinderella concept. We begin by fur-

ther clarifying the concept of ‘world society’and its relationship to international

society. We then identify six global interaction networks in which individuals are

embedded in power relations that have the potential to influence their behavior

(or to empower them to influence the behavior of others). We find that these net-

works do align people’s interests and values on a global scale, but not in the cosmo-

politan directions assumed by most contemporary English School theorists. We

find instead that the networks of world society tend to align individuals hierarch-

ically, and that their peak nodes are overwhelmingly located in or associated with

the United States, which exhibits a level of centrality in world society that is dispro-

portionate even to its (still large) shares of global population, military power, and

GDP. World society has thus given rise, we argue, to a new form of international

society: a central state system. We conclude with a reformulation of the English

School framework that suggests that world society has the potential to give order

to international society, just as international society has itself brought order to

the international system.

The primary institutions of (integrated) world society

Buzan (2018) identifies three different meanings of the term ‘world society’as it is

used in the international relations literature. He labels these normative world soci-

ety, political world society, and integrated world society. Normative world society is

concerned with the ethics of humanity qua humanity, the emerging and evolving

set of near-universal global political norms. A clear example of a world society

behavioral norm is that against slavery (Clark, 2007). This does not mean that slav-

ery has been eradicated, but it does mean that slavery is so widely condemned as to

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persist only on the margins and in the shadows of today’s world. Political world

society is concerned with non-state transnational political activity. The archetype

of political world society is the international non-governmental organization

(INGO) (Boli and Thomas, 1997). Along with (and often through their influence

on) intergovernmental organizations, INGOs participate in shaping the contours

of international society, for example in achieving the formal proscription of slavery

in international law.

Buzan’s third meaning of ‘world society’is integrated world society. Integrated

world society is an amorphous but ultimately unifying and binding concept that

has the potential to endogenize international society and its relationships to norma-

tive and political world society under a single conceptual umbrella. It is the true

‘Cinderella’meaning of world society, the one for which we have the shoe but

lack the foot. In Buzan’s telling:

‘The first two meanings of world society are based on separating the interstate

domain from both the interhuman/normative one, which serves as its norma-

tive reservoir, and the transnational/political one, which serves as the activist

lobby intermediating between normative world society and interstate society.

Integrated world society brings all three domains under one umbrella, creating

an ideal-type for a prospective future’(Buzan, 2018, 6).

He further suggests that integrated world society would eliminate the primacy

of the state over individuals and organizations, or at least make individuals and

organizations ‘subjects of international law in their own right’(Buzan, 2004, 203;

2018, 14). Here we believe Buzan misses the mark. International law is a creature

of international society; an integrated world society that endogenized international

society would ipso facto endogenize international law. In other words, it is enough

to identify an integrated world society that governs international law, even if it does

not raise individuals and organizations to the legal status of states.

Buzan (2018) identifies the key primary institutions of normative and political

world society as ‘collective identity’(p. 9) and ‘advocacy’(p. 11), respectively.

On the model of the term ‘collective identity,’a parallel term for the key primary

institution of political world society might be ‘organized representation,’a con-

struction that reflects the fact that advocacy in world society almost always involves

formal organizations and that those organizations seek (whether successfully or

not) to represent constituencies (real or imaginary). Even the most powerful people

in the world seem to find it appropriate and necessary to participate in world soci-

ety through organizations that purport to represent the interests of others (e.g., the

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Framed in this manner using the formula of

abstract nouns preceded by a qualifying adjective, collective identity and organized

representation in world society correspond to ‘territorial sovereignty’as the key pri-

mary institution of international society. Each of these terms embodies a principle

of legitimacy and a principle of differentiation. For international society, sover-

eignty legitimates the state while territoriality differentiates states from each

other. For normative world society, people’s self-identification as belonging to a

particular social group legitimates group solidarity, while people’s membership in

specific groups differentiates those groups from each other; for political world

296 Salvatore Babones and John H. S. Aberg

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society, representation legitimates the agency of advocates, while organization dif-

ferentiates activist movements.

Buzan (2018) does not identify a key primary institution for integrated world

society, though he does suggest three domains in which the primary institutions

of integrated world society might operate: top-down from international society

into political and normative world society, bottom-up from political and normative

world society into international society, and among units of all types to establish

their rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis each other (Buzan, 2018, 12). The third,

of course, is the key to the puzzle. It construes individual human beings as direct

participants in world society. This represents a return to the classic English

School roots of the concept. In Buzan’s(2001) telling:

‘It is clear that the relationship between international society and world society

is fundamental to English School theory …[but] the concept of world society

remains seriously underspecified, in some ways resembling the theoretical

dustbin that neorealists made of the unit level. In an ontological sense,

world society starts from individuals and is in clear contrast to the state-based

ontology of international society’(Buzan, 2001, 477).

Later Buzan (2004, 44) clarifies that this ‘analytical dustbin, uncomfortably

containing revolutionism, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism’is a catch-all

for Wight’s(1992, 41) three paths to the ‘assimilation’of ‘international relations

to a condition of domestic politics.’It is precisely this dustbin to which we propose

to return. Wight’s political cosmopolitanism evokes a ‘world society of individuals

which overrides nations or states’(Buzan, 2004, 34 quoting Wight, 1992, 45).

In Buzan’s(2004,34–35) analysis, the ‘cosmopolitan scenario is closest to

current understandings of world society, but sits in unreconciled tension with

Wight’s argument that shared cultures have to underpin international societies.’

We see no tension here, because we put no preconceived content into the

Wightian container of Kantian cosmopolitanism. Wight may have identified

cosmopolitanism with the name of Kant (fair enough), but he identified Hitler

and Stalin as Kantians alongside Wilson and Mazzini (Wight, 1992, 160). The

assumption that a cosmopolitan shared culture must be based in moral justice,

so strong in Bull (1977,80–82), is in our view the root error that has generated

much of the confusion that plagues the study of world society today.

Nor do we take for granted Wight’s(1992, 161) own assumption that an actually

existing world society would necessarily embrace a Kantian vision of universal

solidarism. This is to assume that a society must (as opposed to should) exhibit

a solidarity that embraces all of its members, an assumption that is blatantly at

odds with the historical reality of slavery, racialization, patriarchy, colonialism,

and other forms of subjugation within actually-existing societies. In searching for

the primary institutions of actually existing world society, we turn instead to

Buzan’s(2018) more organic approach to identifying world society institutions:

‘What can be said is that whatever principles of differentiation and legitimacy

were agreed amongst the different types of actors would almost certainly

become primary institutions of an integrated world society’(Buzan, 2018, 14).

International Theory 297

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Legitimacy has always been a slippery concept. Though moral philosophers may

never agree on what constitutes a basis for legitimacy in world society, in practice

actually-existing world society institutions have adopted various forms of the tri-

partite mantra of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Enshrined in

the United Nations (2000) Millennium Declaration, democracy, human rights,

and the rule of law are now routinely cited as the ideological foundation of

world society. For example, the world society journal Global Constitutionalism

was launched with an essay that seemingly defined global constitutionalism using

these three concepts (Wiener et al., 2012), and though the editors later pulled

back from that idealistic position (Tully et al., 2016), the ideal remains.

Democracy, human rights, and the rule of law (in particular the fundamental

writ of habeas corpus) are all premised on the more general principle of individu-

alism: the idea that individual self-determination outweighs all but the most press-

ing demands of the group. For whatever reasons (and the reasons are highly

contentious), from the perspective of the twenty-first century it seems clear that

individualism has won out over communitarian ideologies as the legitimating prin-

ciple of world society. Thus whereas modern nationalisms (plural) have often taken

it for granted that the state has the right (and even the responsibility) to interfere in

personal domains of behavior like sexual orientation, abortion rights, drug use, reli-

gious practice, and suicide, postmodern individualism (singular) increasingly places

such behaviors in the realm of individual self-determination. But individualism

alone is not enough: a functioning society (world or otherwise) is more than just

a collection of atomized individuals. Individuals must somehow be bound together

to form a society. To date, both the English School and Stanford School literatures

have tended to focus on international NGOs as the binding elements of world soci-

ety, but very few people actually participate in such organizations. Many more peo-

ple are globally connected through economic networks of work and consumption.

And nearly everyone participates in online social networks and offline personal

relationships that increasingly span the entire world.

Transnational networks serve both to integrate and to differentiate the partici-

pants in world society in relation to each other. We thus identify the key primary

institution of integrated world society as ‘networked individualism’: an institution

that has individualism as its principle of legitimacy and the network structure as its

principle of differentiation. In Table 1 we place this alongside the principles of legit-

imacy and differentiation of other types of society, starting with the national soci-

eties that emerged and evolved in symbiosis with the international system itself.

Following Buzan (2018), we see integrated world society as a system that sub-

sumes international society, normative world society, and political world society

(and, by extension, the international system ad national societies as well). We

describe the interaction networks of world society ‘deterritorialized’because

although their physical nodes must in extremis exist within states, the networks

as such do not (Agnew, 1994).

Whether and to what degree deterritorialized networks really do function to

connect and differentiate individuals is an empirical question, but an obvious

answer to this question is ‘more than ever before.’It is probably no coincidence

that Clark (2007) dates the emergence of normative world society to the early

19th century, a period when technology was just beginning to dramatically shorten

298 Salvatore Babones and John H. S. Aberg

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communication times, and Boli and Thomas (1997) show that political world

society expanded dramatically following World War II, a time when air travel

and global telecommunications finally made it practical to manage integrated (as

opposed to merely affiliated) international NGOs. As technology has developed,

the dramatic increases in the bitrate of global communication networks have

made possible the formation of an integrated world society today.

In the 2000s, of course, ‘the technological unification of the world’(Bull, 1977,

273–276) is taken for granted. The transnational density of today’s communication

networks clearly meets Bull’s(1977, 279) world society criterion of a ‘degree of

interaction linking all parts of the human community.’They also seem to us likely

to establish Bull’s more important ‘common interest and common values on the

basis of which common rules and institutions may be built,’though this is an

empirical question that we will investigate. Thus in the next section we develop a

more systematic framework for identifying the transnational structures that have

the potential to translate global interaction into common rules and institutions

of integrated world society, from which we then derive the outlines of world society

as it actually exists today.

Structural power in the deterritorialized networks of world society

In this section, we take an analytical approach to identifying a set of domains over

which world society may be said to function. Cox (1981, 126) characterized the

pre-globalization era as one in which states ‘are the principal aggregations of pol-

itical power,’and indeed this can be taken as the primary reason why the field of

international relations has the name it does. The shift in focus from international to

world society thus raises the question: what are the principal aggregations of power

in world society? To aid in operationalizing the power networks of world society,

we turn to the international political economy (IPE) literature, which has long

engaged with the study of global power networks and has developed highly-refined,

empirically-supported approaches to categorizing them. We thus follow Buzan’s

(2001, 485) suggestion that a ‘compelling case can be made for integrating

English School theory and IPE.’Williams (2014, 137) similarly suggests that an

IPE perspective ‘can contribute to historical and comparative analyses of the impact

of global-level activity, global-based justificatory strategies, and global institutional

innovations’on ‘world society’s interhuman and transnational elements.’A major

advantage of IPE theory for our purposes is that IPE scholars like Mann (1986) and

Table 1. Principles of legitimacy and differentiation in international and world society

Form of society Principle of legitimacy Principle of differentiation

National society Citizenship Personhood

International society Sovereignty Territoriality

Normative world society Identification Collective membership

Political world society Representation Organization

Integrated world society Individualism Network structure

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Strange (1988) have explored and specified the transnational networks through

which power is exercised in international (and by extension world) society.

International relations scholars, by contrast, have tended to theorize functional

domains in world society without offering specific proposals for how they can be

practically operationalized. For example, only one of Schouenborg’s(2011) five

functional categories for primary world society institutions, ‘trade’(including pro-

duction for exchange), could easily be operationalized. His other four categories,

and the additional functional categories he identifies in the work of Buzan

(2004) and Bull (1977), would be very difficult to study empirically in the context

of a single research paper.

In our empirical analyses of the power networks of world society, we turn for

inspiration primarily to the work of Susan Strange and Michael Mann. Mann

(1986, 1) claims that societies ‘are constituted of multiple overlapping and intersect-

ing sociospatial networks of power’(emphasis in the original) and locates the ‘socio-

spatial capacity for organization’(Mann, 1986, 3) of societies in these power

networks. If world society is indeed a national society writ large, or a society of

any kind at all, then an IPE perspective on world society might suggest that it is

characterized by sociospatial power networks that link (and in many cases subor-

dinate) individuals on a global scale. We see no reason to assume that

actually-existing world society is non-hierarchical. Quite the contrary. If we are cor-

rect that the legitimating principle of national society is citizenship while that of

world society is individualism, then we would expect power differentials in world

society to be relatively less fettered than those exhibited by national societies,

where citizenship rights at least to some degree moderate the differentials between

individuals. On at least one important indicator, the distribution of individual

income, world society is in fact much more unequal than national societies: the glo-

bal Gini coefficient of around 0.7 (Milanovic, 2012, 9) is higher than that of any

country in the world today.

Mann’s‘overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power’imply a

high degree of structure, but structure does not exist solely (or even primarily) in

formal organizations. It exists in social networks as well. We follow Strange in

believing power derived from advantageous positions in structural networks is at

least as important as the visible relational power of one actor over another in formal

organizational hierarchies. Strange herself defined structural power in quite statist

terms as:

‘the power to shape and determine the structures of the global political econ-

omy within which other states, their political institutions, their economic

enterprises and (not least) their scientists and other professional people

have to operate’(Strange, 1988,24–25).

We propose to remove the ‘states’and the possessive ‘their’from this definition, in

order to generalize Strange’s concept of structural power from the international

society with which she was concerned to the world society setting that is the

focus of this article. Thus following Strange we think of structural power in

world society as ‘the power to shape and determine the structures of the global

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political economy within which other actors, political institutions, economic enter-

prises and (not least) scientists, and other professional people have to operate.’

For Strange (1989, 165), structural power ‘embraces customs, usages, and modes

of operation,’whereas relational power ‘stays closer to state-state agreements and

state-centered institutions.’There is a clear parallel here with the contrast between

world society and international society. Strange apparently did not theorize this dis-

tinction, but it is nonetheless implicit in her writing. She wrote that structural

power ‘confers the power to decide how things shall be done, the power to shape

frameworks within which states relate to each other, relate to people, or relate to

corporate enterprises’(Strange, 1988, 25).

Strange (1988,24–32) identified four ‘structures’of power in what we would call

world society: security, production, finance, and knowledge. Mann (1986, 2) simi-

larly identifies a set of four important ‘sources of social power’that he characterizes

as ‘overlapping networks of social interaction’(emphases in the original): ideo-

logical, economic, military, and political. Obviously, these two schemas overlap

substantially, though not completely. We propose to amalgamate them into a set

of six important power networks (Table 2): the military/security, political, eco-

nomic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological networks of power in

world society. We place these six networks on a continuum from the most authori-

tative (characterized by direct commands) to most diffused (characterized by impli-

cit demands) (Mann, 1986,7–10). While territorial versions of each of these

networks exist within states, we are particularly interested in the deterritorialized

networks that span world society.

We do not mean to suggest that the six networks identified in Table 2 are ‘the’

six networks of power in world society, but we do believe that they are among the

most important networks, and that they are reasonably comprehensive in encom-

passing a large part of ‘the totality of global social interaction’(Bull, 1977, 279) that

constitutes world society. Admittedly, not all social interaction involves power rela-

tionships. But power relationships are central to Mann’s (and arguably Strange’s)

models of society, as well as to the discipline of international relations. Mann

(2013, 3) goes so far as to claim that globalization itself is ‘merely the product of

expansions of the sources of social power.’Although we would not go so far as

Mann in seeing society only in terms of power, and we believe that other forms

of social interaction are undoubtedly important (perhaps more important) to the

individuals who make up a society, we agree with Mann that power relationships

are inherent in the network ties that bind society together. Power networks can

thus be used to elucidate the ‘common rules and institutions’of Bull’s(1977,

279) world society, even if they do not necessarily identify the ‘sense of common

interest and common values’that underlies them.

Six networks of power in world society

In this section, we analyze each of the six deterritorialized networks of power of

Table 2 from an empirical perspective. We are primarily interested in the

human-to-human world society aspects of these networks. Since military power

is almost by definition authoritative, we begin with the most authoritative

of power networks, military/security networks. They represent, in a sense, the

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worst-case scenario for finding world society institutions; if we find world society

even in authoritative military/security networks, we would expect to find much

more of it in the more diffuse networks of civil society. We thus move from mili-

tary/security networks out toward progressively more diffused networks where

world society is presumably more likely to operate. Our final set of networks, ideo-

logical networks, brings us face to face with what we argue is the key primary insti-

tution of world society: networked individualism.

Military/security networks

The military/security domain is clearly one of the most important spheres of state

activity; realists might say the most important. Bull’s(1977)Anarchical Society was

mainly dedicated to establishing the possibility of an international society of states

that rests on a web of military/security networks like diplomatic alliances, balance

of power, international law, great power management, and even war. Yet today’s

military/security networks are much more deeply rooted at the level of

human-to-human interaction than were the alliance networks of the past. The

most advanced of these networks is NATO, which not only conducts joint exercises

involving personnel from across its 29 member states but has since its 2012 Chicago

summit moved decisively toward the creation of multinational battle groups. These

groups, which place troops from multiple member states in a single unit under a

single commander, represent a level of human-to-human transnational military

cooperation much deeper than anything exhibited in the pre-globalization era.

The multinational interoperability of NATO forces depends not only on compat-

ible equipment and communication systems but also on shared military doctrines,

which cover the nuts and bolts of everything from how to advance under covering

fire from a helicopter gunship to how to triage patients in a military first aid station.

Doctrines are essentially behavioral manuals that create a shared transnational cul-

ture that makes it possible for people from different countries to communicate and

work together. All NATO military forces are trained to behave in line with a single

set of doctrines, creating a dense network of human-to-organization-to-human ties

that spans 29 countries. These ties are reinforced in the seven major NATO training

facilities and a range of NATO-related Centres of Excellence, Partnership Training

and Education Centres, and Partnership for Peace Defense Academies. Nor are the

people educated in these institutions drawn solely from NATO countries.

Table 2. Six deterritorialized networks of power derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988)

Our six examples of deterritorialized

networks

Mann’s networks of

power

Strange’s structures of

power

1. Military/security Military Security

2. Political Political

3. Economic/production Economic Production

4. Credit Credit

5. Knowledge Knowledge

6. Ideological Ideological

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Beyond NATO, states increasingly rely on transnational epistemic communities

to provide external security expertise and advice –and to legitimate, if not to out-

right formulate, state policy. In Europe, epistemic communities generally operate

around and through treaty organizations like NATO and the European Union,

which may obscure the distinction between international society and world society.

Nonetheless, an epistemic community like the European Union’s Permanent

Structured Cooperation (PESCO) is clearly not so much a European defense treaty

(international society) as an arrangement for setting common standards for infra-

structure and procurement (world society, even if only at a European level).

Similarly, most of Africa’s military forces are educated in NATO doctrine by

American and NATO ally advisors at pan-African training centers, even if that

education is often poorly conducted (Jowell, 2018). In East Asia, by contrast, the

military/security epistemic community operates in the absence of robust intergov-

ernmental treaty organizations. Jerden (2017) argues that the ideological biases of

members of the Asia-Pacific community of military and security experts strongly

shape state behavior in favor of alliance with the United States. More broadly,

even non-Western and anti-Western groupings like the Gulf Cooperation

Council and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization frame their activities in

terms of ‘fighting terrorism’and upholding human rights, albeit their own idiosyn-

cratic interpretations of what and whose human rights. In so doing, they implicitly

accept the principle that the relevant epistemic level on which they operate is that of

world society, even as they attempt to bend world society concepts to fit their own

interests.

The epistemic redefinition of global security provision in terms of military

cooperation against non-state actors generates demand for ever-increasing inter-

operability, which is often framed in light of ‘global threats’(Derleth, 2015).

Interoperability might indeed be seen as a primary institution of military/security

world society, if it is possible to have a ‘world’society that excludes the citizens of a

limited number of states. Private military companies (PMCs) play a key but often

overlooked (and perhaps intentionally obscured) role in shaping the ‘security

understandings of key actors and hence their interests and preferences’(Leander,

2005, 803). In the military/security networks of world society, (in)security is indi-

vidualized: targeted killings and PMCs are employed against recalcitrant non-state

actors in ways that go beyond, challenge, or modify conventional inter-national law

(Leander, 2010; Trenta, 2018). International law itself has become weaponized by

both sides in asymmetric warfare pitting states against individuals and non-state

actors (Irani, 2018). Put simply, wars between states are now rare; wars against indi-

viduals have become routine.

The rise of military/security world society implies a shift from the balance-of-

power politics or international society to a new world society logic of disperse-

and-rule (cf. Nexon, 2007, 111, who sees this as a shift from ‘balance-of-power

politics to logics of divide-and-rule’). Interoperability is the primary institution

for this transition, as it facilitates the militarization of global action against non-

state (as opposed to state-level) actors. Although state-to-state warfighting remains

an important function of the world’s military forces, the shift in emphasis from

international society to world society has seen the primary focus of the world’s

armed forces shift from state to non-state actors, from conventional interstate

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wars to Kaldor’s(2015)‘new wars’of drug enforcement, anti-piracy patrols, and

antiterrorism operations. Today’s military/security networks are increasingly com-

posed of and directed against individuals rather than states, shifting the center of

gravity of military/security networks substantially (if not overwhelmingly) from

international society to world society.

Political networks

Though not as extremely authoritative as military/security networks, political net-

works are also by nature authoritative, yet here too we find signs of budding world

society. At least three developments distinguish political networks in world society.

First, there has been a shift from ‘old’state-centric diplomacy to ‘new’diplomacy

composed of multiple actors and networks that coalesce in various issue-areas

(Cooper and Hocking, 2000; Bjola and Kornprobst, 2013,44–60; Adler-Nissen,

2015) as the drafting of treaties increasingly involves consultation with multiple

stakeholders and non-state actors (Backstrand et al., 2017). Second, there has

been an increasing tendency of non-state actors to use international law as a stra-

tegic ‘resource’(cf. Hurd, 2011, who views international law as strategic resource,

yet a resource used by states), the interpretation of which is often ceded to the

Anglo-American arbitration community (Gindin and Panitch, 2012). Third, rather

than lobbying their national capitals, participants in the political networks of world

society increasingly tend to seek favor in Washington, where effective power (or at

least influence) is often perceived to lie (Strange, 1989, 170; Babones, 2014).

Sanctions regimes are clear examples of where all three aspects of political net-

works in world society converge. International sanctions, especially those imposed

by the United States, have become a potent political tool (Drezner, 2015).

Advocates lobby Washington to influence the make-up of sanctions, and through

US law, sanctions are enforced that can cut countries off from the global financial

system, international trade, access to energy resources, etc. Sanctions themselves are

often focused on elite individuals and government-linked companies, rather than

on countries themselves. Travel bans and bank account freezes are directed at pri-

vate individuals with the purpose of influencing state action, not directed at govern-

ments, heads of state, or diplomats, who in fact continue to enjoy international

travel and access to funds. Sanctions thus operate through the informal networks

of structural power in world society as well as through the formal channels of rela-

tional power in international society.

Beyond sanctions, extraterritorial jurisprudence more broadly is an area where

nontraditional actors are able to exert influence in the political networks of

world society by leveraging public court systems to achieve private goals. Even

more than in the case of sanctions regimes, it is US law, rather than formal inter-

national law, that serves as the primary lever of power. Extraterritorial US anti-

bribery prosecutions even seem to have the effect of spurring other countries to

enforce their own anti-bribery laws (Kaczmarek and Newman, 2011). The wide

reach of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is a clear example of the

emerging power of extraterritorial jurisprudence (Leibold, 2014), but it is not the

only one. American approaches to securities regulation have been extended to

much of the world through a process of ‘deliberate regulatory export’(Bach and

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Newman, 2010, 524), and the global private enforcement of American copyright

law has reached epic proportions due to the global dominance of the US-based

internet giants who host much of the world’s digital content. Through these and

similar channels, extraterritorial jurisprudence infuses derivative world society

institutions like sanctions, arbitration, and jurisdiction shopping.

The global reach of political world society is perhaps best illustrated by the lim-

ited protests against it led by Russia and China. Their 2016 joint declaration asserts

an international relations doctrine demanding ‘a just and equitable international

order’based on formal international treaties and the sovereign equality of states

(MOFARF, 2016). As much as they may breach these principles in practice,

Russia and China seek to use the international society principles of international

law and sovereign equality as a defensive shield against extraterritorial jurispru-

dence and the individualization of de facto international law enforcement, which

for them reflect the ‘hegemonism’of the United States (Yilmaz, 2016). Russia,

China, and other counter-hegemonic actors routinely decry the ongoing transform-

ation of the ‘old’political international society dominated by intergovernmental

organizations into a ‘new’political world society dominated by more nimble private

transnational regulatory organizations (PTROs; Abbott, Green, and Keohane,

2016). As with military/security networks, global political networks may not be

dominated by world society actors, but world society actors are increasingly present

and powerful in these networks, and increasingly skilled at using political networks

to support individual and organizational, rather than purely national, goals.

Economic/production networks

The economic globalization of the last fifty years has led to the emergence of trans-

national production networks in which production no longer takes place primarily

in nationally contained economies, but is organized globally through different pro-

duction modules in a number of countries with specialized roles in the production

process. This transformation of the global economy has given rise to the concept of

global value chains (GVCs), which approach the global political economy ‘through

the conceptual architecture of chain governance and network dynamics’(Neilson,

Pritchard, and Yeung, 2014, 1). An apt way to conceive the state’s role in these glo-

bal production networks is as an ‘inter-scalar mediator’that facilitates coupling

processes between global corporations and local firms (Lee, Heo, and Kim, 2014).

A key aspect of value chain management is the power of lead firms to coordinate

global value chains and the value-added activities of numerous economic actors

embedded in global production networks. Central to this system-wide corporate

governance is the outsourcing of peripheral, labor-intensive, low-value added pro-

ductive functions to low cost locations while high-value added activities such as

R&D, design, branding, marketing, and customer service are maintained in the

advanced consumer markets (Gereffi, 1994; Nolan, Zhang, and Liu, 2008).

Intermediaries that primarily provide intangible service inputs, such as legal con-

sultants, logistics services, and technical-economic networks of standard-setters

also play critical roles in this new global political economy (Loconto and Busch,

2010; Coe, 2014). Yet although ‘activities are widely dispersed across the globe,

power is still highly concentrated’(Starrs, 2013: 819).

International Theory 305

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In an economy organized around global and regional production networks and

global value chains, trade in value-added (TiVA) becomes more important for

understanding the global distribution of power and rewards than official inter-

national trade figures (Koopman et al., 2010;WTO,2011). China hosts the world’s

largest manufacturing and assembly hubs, but the Chinese value-added often repre-

sents a minor share of the total value of its exports; in TiVA terms, the bulk of the

value-added often accrues to foreign firms (Linden, Kraemer, and Dedrick, 2009;

Dedrick, Kraemer, and Linden, 2010). As a result, China’s dominance in produc-

tion at the lower ends of GVCs does not translate into a central position in global

economic networks. In fact, US transnational corporations continue to dominate

the global political economy –and that dominance is most pronounced in high-

technology sectors. Starrs (2013) analyzed the world’s 2000 largest public compan-

ies by market capitalization and found that US corporations hold the top positions

in terms of profit share in 18 out of 25 sectors. In 10 of those sectors, the aggregate

profit share of US corporations exceeds 40%.

In the online networks at the peak of today’s economic/production networks,

command and control ‘works through different types of governance that act

upon participants “at-a-distance”.’(Neil, Pritchard, and Yeung, 2014, 2). This

‘at-a-distance’governance of global production networks in the virtual economy

is heavily tilted towards American (or at least US-based) firms (Starrs, 2013;

Schwartz, 2017b). Moreover, the transnational global corporate elite who control

these firms is increasingly concentrated in the United States (Carroll, 2009; van

Apeldoorn and de Graaff, 2014). Carroll and Carson (2003) conclude that the

highly selective and centralized networks of the global corporate elite are not merely

dealing with corporate management, but are actively engaged in business activism

that seeks to promote policies that fall in line with their global-political economic

interests. If the global value chain is the primary institution of the economic/pro-

duction networks of world society, that society prioritizes elite companies and indi-

viduals over state institutions to such an extent that support for the corporate sector

is construed as the raison d’etre of the state itself.

Credit networks

Globalization has facilitated the expansion of international monetary and credit

flows to unprecedented heights. Foreign currency trading, for example, averaged

$5.1 trillion per day in 2016, which annually amounts to about 25 times global

GDP (BIS, 2016, 3). Trade in various financial derivatives is several times larger

still. Under the postwar Bretton Woods system of international currency exchange,

individuals could not trade currencies with other individuals, and indeed the

transfer of currency from one country to another was highly regulated. That

world is gone. Today, nongovernmental financial flows vastly outweigh official

currency transactions between governments, and private investment flows vastly

outweigh state-to-state official development assistance (ODA). Even the personal

remittances of migrant workers are now three times the size of ODA (World

Bank, 2016).

Despite anxiety and hope about alternative economic models and new centers of

governance (e.g., G20, BRICS, AIIB) following the 2008 financial crisis, today’s

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credit networks remain steeply hierarchical. As Oatley et al.(2013, 148) conclude

based on a study of network structures, ‘the US is more firmly ensconced at the

center of the global financial system than commonly appreciated.’Several studies

demonstrate the continued dominant position of the US Dollar as the global reserve

currency (e.g., Cohen-Benney, 2014; Faudot and Ponsot, 2016; Kaltenbrunner and

Lysandrou, 2017) and the Dollar is one of the currencies traded in 88% of all

foreign exchange transactions (BIS, 2016, 3). The US and its close ally, the

United Kingdom, together account for nearly 80% of all interest rate

derivatives trading, a figure that has consistently risen from less than 50% in

1995 (Fichtner, 2017, 12). As a result, the US Federal Reserve has become a de

facto global lender of last resort, as demonstrated during the 2007–2009 global

financial crisis, when the Fed provided nearly $4.5 trillion of Dollar liquidity

to the world’s central banks to prevent a global balance of payment crisis

(Tooze, 2018, 207).

The particular strength of the US/UK nexus in global monetary networks is rein-

forced by Anglo-American dominance in credit and finance. The US share of bond

market capitalization is an astonishing 80% of the global total (Kaltenbrunner and

Lysandrou, 2017, 682) and US government bonds remain the global ‘safe haven’

asset class in times of crisis (Hager, 2017). As Fichtner (2017, 28) puts it, ‘today

Anglo-American global finance –a complex amalgam of public and private author-

ity –permeates almost every political economy in the world and influences political

and economic decision-making.’

Apart from the monetary seigniorage derived from issuing debt in the form of

what is, in effect, a global store of value, the United States (or rather its corporate

sector) is subsidized by seigniorage in all kinds of services. There is seigniorage in

the provision of technological platforms, licensing fees, intellectual property rights,

and all sorts of ‘club’or ‘franchise’goods (Schwartz, 2017a). Licensing fees are ‘vir-

tual cash pipelines’that allow corporations, after major investments in research &

development and patent portfolios, to ‘simply collect cash’(Herbert and Kinney,

2013, 4). In 2016, the United States received around $122 billion in earnings

from licensing fees, while China received a mere $519 million (plus another

$642 million received by Hong Kong); conversely, the United States was charged

$43 billion and China $24 billion for the use of others’intellectual property

(World Bank, 2017). Moreover, IPRs disproportionally benefit already dominant

firms (Schwartz, 2017b, 238).

The various forms of seigniorage together form the primary institution through

which today’s credit networks are structured and governed. After four decades of

financial globalization, the derivative institutions of world society credit networks

like monetary seigniorage and intellectual property remain overwhelmingly con-

centrated in the United States (with a secondary node in the United Kingdom).

Rather than posing a challenge to American centrality, globalization has led to

the atrophy of national credit allocation systems as free-flowing capital has shifted

into networks governed by and from the United States. As globalization has freed

people (and their money) to form connections without regard for international

borders, the credit networks formed by their voluntary associations have centralized

around distinctly (Anglo-) American nodes.

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Knowledge networks

The possibilities of global collaboration, exchange of ideas, and knowledge transfer

have never been greater than they are today. Yet even as information has become

more accessible, knowledge networks have become increasingly formalized, quan-

tified, and centralized. Universities now occupy the peak positions in global knowl-

edge networks, far overshadowing once-premier scientific associations like the

Royal Society, national academies, and civil society organizations like the Royal

and National Geographic Societies. Meyer et al.(1997) put universities at the

heart of world society, and subsequent research in the Stanford School has focused

on the role of universities in globalizing knowledge (Munch, 2014, 1). Universities

are now at the core of a system of global academic stratification that has developed

hand in hand with the commodification and homogenization of higher education

(Erkkila, 2016, 179).

The neoliberalization of universities and the adoption of a performance culture

most clearly embodied in competition for rankings (Munch, 2014). Global ranking

systems like Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), first published by

Shanghai Jiao Tong University and now published by Shanghai Ranking

Consultancy, are increasingly used to gauge the quality and competitiveness of uni-

versities. These systems clearly indicate the ‘existence of an Anglo-American aca-

demic hegemony in the early 21st century’(Jons and Hoyler, 2013, 51). The

global ranking systems view the top-ranked Anglo-American elite universities ‘as

models to emulate, identifying their key attributes as necessary for success in the

global competition for excellence in higher education’(Erkkila, 2016, 178–179;

see also Allen, 2017). Whether or not Anglo-American dominance continues

into the future, Anglo-American universities have set the institutional patterns

that other universities increasingly seek to emulate.

Global academic competition gives rise to pressures that produce isomorphism

in the form of functionally equivalent researchers that emulate American academic

practices to maximize the quantitative output (Ramirez, Meyer, and Lerch, 2016).

Non-US/UK universities that desire to join the global elite seek after educational

alliances with the top-tiered US and UK institutions and deploy strategies that

include internationalization of the curriculum, exchange programs, double degree

programs, research collaborations, the attraction of star scientists, offshore opera-

tions, and the establishment of teaching and research consortia (Ishikawa, 2009;

Jons and Hoyler, 2013). Beyond the academy, US intellectual dominance is rein-

forced by foundation centrality (Parmar, 2012, 3): the influence of American phil-

anthropic foundations, such as the ‘Big 3’(Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie

established at the turn of the twentieth century) or the present dominance of the

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The coalescence of global knowledge networks on Anglo-American patterns is

closely tied to the rise of English as ‘the’global language. English is more than

just a (neutral) lingua franca for world society. English is a lingua economica

(global business and advertising), a lingua emotiva (global popular culture and con-

sumerism), a lingua academica (global universities and publishing), and of course a

lingua Americana (Phillipson, 2008). The internet in particular was born and has

grown up as an US-dominated English-language domain. As Wikipedia notes, the

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language and location of its editors are ‘very Western-centric,’yet more than

Western-centric, it is US-centric as well as being extremely English-centric

(Wikimedia, 2011; Konieczny, 2014). Trends in book publishing confirm this pic-

ture (Wischenbart, 2013, 16).

With global internet search and social networking (outside China’s walled inter-

net) effectively monopolized by a small number of global firms, the world increas-

ingly sees a single version of ‘the’news. Globalization has made so much

information available that finding it has replaced producing it as the most import-

ant factor deciding what will be read (watched, heard), and by whom. The rewards

to celebrity and the challenges of discoverability suggest that something like ‘dis-

tinction’(in the sense of Bourdieu, 1984) might be the primary institution in the

knowledge networks of world society, since distinction is at the heart of discover-

ability in the hierarchical knowledge networks of world society. The rankings cul-

ture, foundation culture, and ultimately the dominance of the English language

itself might be considered derivative institutions of this primary institution.

Ideological networks

Ideological networks are the most diffuse of Mann’s (1986) sources of social power

and as a result the most difficult to pin down empirically. In today’s multicultural

world society there is a tendency to admit the legitimacy of all ideologies on an

equal basis, but in many ways that admission is no more than skin-deep. For

example, world society seems to admit the legitimacy of all religions, even ‘invented

religions’based on the backstories of contemporary science fiction films, so long as

they hold genuine meaning for their adherents (Cusack, 2010, 142–149). Yet that

legitimacy is readily called into question when adherents of a religion hold theo-

logical positions that conflict with the sanctity of the individual. Thus official reli-

gious communitarianism (e.g., the civil enforcement of Sharia law) is often seen as

being in direct conflict with world society precepts (Walby, 2003, 537). In multicul-

tural world society, all ideologies are equal, but some ideologies are more equal than

others in setting the ‘standard of civilization’(Buzan, 2014b).

In principle, the primacy of the individual would seem to put all states on an

equal footing, but in practice it privileges some points of view over others, and

Anglo-American points of view above all. Organizations that monitor and rate

countries on their respect for human rights are disproportionately based in the

United States, the United Kingdom, and closely aligned countries. Though rela-

tively passive, the world society ‘clictivism’(Halupka, 2018) of social network

engagement is also embedded in a small number of global online social networks.

Though there are many clicktivists on national networks like those in China and

Russia, their activism is necessarily regional in reach, not global.

If the primary institution of the ideological networks of world society is indi-

vidualism, the historical and structural center of those networks is to be found in

the United States. Tellingly, both Russian Eurasianists (e.g., Dugin, 2012) and

Chinese neo-Confucianists (e.g., Zhao, 2009) identify individualism as a distinctly

American threat to the international society as such. In an international society of

states, Russia, China, and other states can ally in various combinations to balance

the United States and restore multipolarity to the state system. But in a world

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society of individuals, neither Russian posturing nor Chinese withdrawal is able to

balance the ideological field against the structural center. Even these two cham-

pions of statism have resorted to social network activism in their efforts to remain

relevant in the ideological networks of world society.

The endogenization of international relations

Susan Strange (1988, 28) thought US structural power would prove durable;

Michael Mann (2013, 427) does not. Both see the question in terms of international

society, not world society, though Strange comes closer to the mark when she con-

cludes that ‘the source of its power has shifted from the land and the people into

control over structures of the world system’(Strange, 1988, 235). For Strange

(1989, 170), ‘authority in this nonterritorial empire is exercised directly on people –

not on land.’That comes very close to our conceptualization of world society.

Whether it is conceived of as a ‘nonterritorial empire’(Strange, 1989, 170), a ‘neo-

medieval order’(Bull, 1977, 254–255), or even an ‘American tianxia’(Babones,

2017), our analyses indicate that the actually existing power networks of world soci-

ety of the twenty-first century are, as Buzan (2018, 14) suggests, ‘strongly influenced

by functional differentiation.’Going beyond Buzan and the classical English School,

however, we find that world society is not just functionally differentiated but also

steeply hierarchical.

Functional differentiation in international relations is the idea that power need

not be concentrated in a Hobbesian leviathan state, but might instead be con-

founded in complicated networks in which states, organizations, and influential

individuals compete and cooperate to achieve their goals. Globalization has suffi-

ciently dissolved state containers to make such ‘neomedieval’power networks pos-

sible. Yet in each of the six deterritorialized networks we examined, American

institutions –though not necessarily the US state itself –occupy preeminent posi-

tions. This affirms the English School idea of functional differentiation, but with a

difference. In the English School, world society has been ‘associated with moral

cosmopolitanism’(Williams, 2014, 132) and has been ‘linked mainly to liberal

cosmopolitan perspectives and to concerns about justice’(Buzan, 2014a, 16). In

contrast, we see no theoretical reason to expect world society to be any more equit-

able than domestic societies, and no empirical evidence to suggest that it is.

The primary institutions corresponding to each of our six deterritorialized net-

works of power are summarized in Table 3, together with examples of derivative

institutions and secondary institutions. The integrated world society circumscribed

by the six primary institutions of Table 3 fits reasonably well with Bull’s(1977, 279)

test criteria: it consists (1) of global or near-global interaction networks that (2)

aligning people’s interests and values in ways that (3) give rise to shared institu-

tions. It may often be that people’s alignment is involuntary and that their shared

institutions are unpalatable, but military interoperability, extraterritorial jurispru-

dence, participation in global value chains, the payment of monetary and intellec-

tual property seigniorage, the striving for distinction in global knowledge networks,

and the embrace of the dignity of the individual all meet Bull’s criteria and are all

relatively new in world history.

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In an integrated world society, power does not necessarily follow the logic of the

past, since mobile factors of production, global financial centers, and global infor-

mation and communication networks all ‘challenge the geographical basis of con-

ventional international relations theory’and erode the formerly close-fitting

connection between territory and power (Agnew, 1994, 77). Whereas the relational

power of states is necessarily territorial, structural power in world society is deter-

ritorialized in global networks. Network externalities ensure that over time more

and more people –and elites in even greater proportions –strive to participate

in those global networks. As a result, world society is inexorably expansionary, des-

pite the fact that individual participation in world society is, in principle, voluntary.

Integrated world society incorporates individuals from all countries in an intercon-

nected network of networks, and the United States is its central state at the inter-

section of those networks. The United States is rather more than the central state of

a global-Western state-conglomerate (Shaw, 2000, 199–208) arising from a set of

interlocking sympathies and alliances among state actors. It is the central state

of the first-order global society of individual human beings, the territorial space

at the heart of the deterritorialized networks of integrated world society.

Neorealist IR theory (Waltz, 1979) was developed to explain the operation of

relational power in the anarchic international system associated with modernity,

and it does it well (Goddard and Nexon, 2005). The early English School sought

to bring order to the modern international system through its focus on the inter-

national society in which international relations (including even war) are con-

ducted. International societies arise when states in an international system allow

their actions to be circumscribed by shared norms of expected and acceptable con-

duct. But shared norms presuppose at least some degree of mutual understanding

among competing states and their leaders. Thus Bull’s(1977, 13) much quoted

Table 3. Six primary institutions of integrated world society networks, with examples of derivative and

secondary institutions

1. Military/

security

Interoperability Military doctrines, joint

exercises, global

threats discourses

NATO doctrine, RIMPAC,

counter-terrorism

collaboration

2. Political Extraterritorial

jurisprudence

Sanctions, arbitration,

jurisdiction

shopping

Iran sanctions, arbitration

courts, FCPA

3. Economic/

Production

Global value

chains

Production networks,

technology

platforms,

corporate elites

Operating systems, app

stores, corporate

interlocks

4. Credit Seigniorage Monetary seigniorage,

intellectual

property

US Dollar, financial

markets, licensing fees

5. Knowledge Distinction Rankings culture,

foundation culture,

English language

University rankings,

private foundations,

Wikipedia

6. Ideological Individualism Democracy, human

rights, rule of law

Elections, tribunals, rights

discourses

International Theory 311

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explanation that an international society ‘exists when a group of states …form a

society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set

of rules in their relations with one another’should be read alongside his qualifica-

tion that:

‘A common feature of …historical international societies is that they were all

founded upon a common culture or civilization, or at least on some of the ele-

ments of such a civilization: a common language, a common epistemology and

understanding of the universe, a common religion, a common ethical code, a

common aesthetic or artistic tradition’(Bull, 1977, 16).

In this ‘civilizational view’of international society, ‘some element of world soci-

ety is a precondition to international society’(Buzan, 1993, 337). But what happens

when world society expands beyond the modicum necessary to support inter-

national society? The classical English School vision that such a world society

would necessarily embrace cosmopolitan values and a Kantian vision of universal

solidarism is, in our view, just so much wishful thinking. Nonetheless, we do

observe the existence of multiple overlapping world society power networks that

have the potential to influence international society just as international society

itself has the potential to influence the international system. Today’s international

society of putatively sovereign states is embedded within (steeply hierarchical)

world society networks that together constitute Bull’s‘common culture or civiliza-

tion’that defines the ‘common set of rules’of today’s actually-existing international

society. Those rules are in effect the derivative institutions of world society.

The relationship between world society and international society, as well as that

between international society and the international system, can be clarified by

reconfiguring Buzan’s(2001, 475, 2004, 9) famous ‘wheel’diagram summarizing

the three traditions of English School theory. In Buzan’s configuration (our

Figure 1a), world society, international society, and the international system

touch on and influence each other. The English School has been very effective in

theorizing the boundary between the international system and international society.

But it has had difficulty theorizing the boundary between the international system

and world society. Buzan construes this boundary in ‘imperial’and ‘messianic’

terms, and rightly so: to us it seems likely that world societies can only directly

shape international systems at extreme historical conjunctures, for example the

Mongol conquests of Genghis Khan or the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

True clashes of civilizations like these are extremely rare, and now that the entire

world is encompassed by a single world society, unlikely to happen again.

In the ordinary ebb and flow of international relations, we would expect world

society to influence the shape of the international system mainly through its effects

on international society, as depicted in our Figure 1b. Thus in our version of the

English School trinity, there are usually only two relevant interfaces, not three.

Our Figure 1b corresponds more closely to the Stanford School model of world

society, in which world society is understood as the level of society that ‘allocates

responsible and authoritative actorhood to nation-states’(Meyer at al., 1997,

169). This approach makes clear why the interfaces between world society and

international society and between international society and the international system

312 Salvatore Babones and John H. S. Aberg

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are the interfaces that are best developed in both English School and Stanford

School theory. World society sets the parameters of international society in a

way analogous to that by which international society sets the parameters of the

international system. As globalization has strengthened the levers of structural

power in world society, it has strengthened the ability of world society to shape

international society. A stronger international society has, in turn, imposed a

greater degree of order on the international system and dampened its anarchical

tendency toward interstate war.

The endogenization model presented in Figure 1b interacts with the empirics of

world society power networks to provide a framework for injecting IPE concepts of

hierarchy, hegemony, and order into the English School. Wight assumed that inter-

national society would be strongest when there is an ‘even distribution of power’

(1966, 103), but the contrast between the high nineteenth century Concert of Europe

and today’s hierarchical international society strongly suggests that he was wrong.

International society seems to be much more effective now than it was then, though

it is today much farther from being a society of equals. It is effective because it is sup-

ported by a much more robust –though much less equal –world society.

Acknowledgements. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Johan Modee, Barry Buzan, Erik

Ringmar, Derek Hutcheson, and the three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on earlier drafts.

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Apr 2023

This paper seeks to contribute to the English School's (ES) understanding of the European Regional International Society (ERIS) through the work of Karl Polanyi. While ES theory has long been interested in regional international societies, its general approach remains limited to a methodologically internationalist frame that fails to capture the dynamism and historical change of regional formations. We therefore aim to better ground the ES account of the ERIS within a more robust political economy framework that incorporates domestic dynamics with international processes. The article first examines the making of the nineteenth-century liberal order and its eventual breakdown during the turn of the century—the “great transformation”, which ultimately informed the rationale for the European Community (EC). We then focus our analysis on the EC's Common Agricultural Policy. With specific examination of sugar production, we explore the tensions and contradictions bound up with the formation of a protected domestic and regional sugar market, the pressures it exerted on the wider international society, and the ways in which European officials skillfully exploited the post-Cold War liberalization of international society as a means of (partially) “disembedding” European sugar. Lastly, we hope that this article begins a new conversation on how the tenets of political economy (Polanyian or otherwise) might, at long last, make an impact on ES theory.

World society and the convergence of consumer values: Buying patterns of eco-certification in the UAE

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2023
Bus Strat Environ

Eco‐certifications offer consumers the opportunity to vote with their money for more sustainable methods of production. While consumer‐facing eco‐labels are mostly recognized and consumed in western countries little is known about their performance in expat societies. This study applies world society theory to a sample of Arab, Western, and South Asian United Arab Emirates (UAE) residents to test whether globalization causes assimilation of familiarity, attitudes, and buying frequencies for major eco‐labels. The results show that respondents with Western ethnicities are more familiar with eco‐certifications. However, Arab, and South‐Asian citizens report similar or higher levels of importance for the purported benefits of eco‐certifications. Among respondents familiar with eco‐certification, we found no differences in buying frequency by ethnic group. Findings related to ethnicity support world society theory because social, environmental, and quality ideals converge among different ethnic groups in the UAE.

International Student Revenue and International Rankings Success: A Case Study of Australian University Research Strategies

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2022

Salvatore Babones

The publication of the first major international university rankings in 2003 opened up a new era in the internationalization of higher education, with universities around the world reorienting their research efforts toward securing success in international (as opposed to domestic) ranking systems. This has generated a potential principal-agency problem, as nationally-funded universities increasingly seek international validation. This opens up the possibility that a focus on rankings success might actually lead universities to implement policies that undermine their educational missions. This paper examines Australian universities’ pursuit of international rankings over the first two decades of the twenty-first century as a case study in the internationalization of higher education, with a focus on the behavior of Australia’s Group of Eight (Go8) research-intensive universities. Two major findings emerge. First, many Australian universities seem to have excessively expanded their international student enrolments as a way to generate the funds needed to compete in the ‘rankings game’. Second, many Australian universities seem to have prioritized research in fields that yield higher returns in rankings outcomes. These findings provide circumstantial evidence that Go8 universities may have compromised their educational missions in the pursuit of rankings success.

Digital Age and Personal Data Protection

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Radi Petrov Romansky

he contemporary digital age is characterized by the significant informatization of society and the increasing role of technologies in people's lives, which leads to a change in their behaviour. This is related not only to social communications and free remote access to different information, but also to the virtualization and intellectualization of various processes based on cloud and mobile cloud computing, Internet of Tings, smart home & city, Big Data Analytics, etc. All this raises the question of how users' privacy is ensured and who takes care of the protection of their personal data in the global network space. Answers to such questions is the task of this book. In this respect, a summary of special features of informatization as a basis for the development of the modern information society based on the technologies of the digital age is made. The role of information technology as a tool for the implementation of public and business processes in data processing, including personal data, is considered. Ensuring adequate data protection requires application of the principles of information security and fulfilment of the requirements of the legal framework of personal data protection. The structural and technological organization of data protection requires the development of a policy and strategy for the implementation of organizational and technological means to ensure compliance with the requirements of the GDPR. However, regardless of the measures taken, it is necessary for users of services in the digital space to have the necessary level of digital literacy, which requires knowledge of the specifics of technology and especially the possible problems for privacy and personal data protection which are discussed in the last chapter of this book.

Revisiting world society

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2018
Int Polit

Barry Buzan

This paper revisits Buzan’s book (From international to world society? English school theory and the social structure of globalization, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), in the light of both the seven papers in this special issue, and the English School literature on world society written since then. The paper focuses on two themes. First, it addresses the different meanings in the usage of ‘world society’. It distils these down into three forms: normative, political and integrated world society, and shows how these relate to, and extend, the earlier taxonomy of interhuman, transnational and interstate domains. Second, it pushes forward on the question of how we might understand the concept of primary institutions in relation to world society. I show how some, but not all, of the primary institutions of interstate society have deep roots in world society. I then propose that the key primary institution for normative world society is collective identity, and for political world society, advocacy.

Western Values in International Relations

Chapter

Jan 2022

Martin Wight

This essay presents the three main traditions of thinking about international relations in Western societies since the sixteenth century, with particular attention to the ‘middle ground’ between extremes. These extremes are typified by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes at one pole, and Kant and Wilson at the other. The via media is associated with the development of constitutional government and the rule of law, as represented by thinkers such as Grotius and Gladstone. The essay illustrates the differences among these three traditions by analysing their distinct positions concerning international society, the maintenance of order, intervention, and international morality. ‘Western values’ are most effectively supported by thinkers and leaders who neither deny the existence of international society nor exaggerate its foreseeable prospects for gaining greater cohesion and strength. The middle course—the mainstream of the ‘Western values’ tradition—respects moral standards and sees moral challenges as complex, instead of regarding them as simple or nonexistent.

Peacekeeping in Africa: Politics, Security and the Failure of Foreign Military Assistance

Book

Jan 2018

Marco Jowell

The forgotten history of the financial crisis: What the world should have learned in 2008

Article

Sep 2018
FOREIGN AFF

A. Tooze

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

Article

Dec 1985

American Tianxia: Chinese Money, American Power and the End of History

Book

Jul 2017

Salvatore Babones

After a meteoric rise, China's once inexorable growth has come to a screeching halt. With it ends China's dream of establishing a new tianxia ('harmonious order') in Asia with China at its centre. Salvatore Babones provides an up-to-date assessment of China's economic problems and how they are undermining China's challenge to the Western-dominated world order. As China's neighbours and many of its own most talented people look to the United States to ensure their security and prosperity, global power is slowly but surely consolidating in a twenty-first century American Tianxia. A closely argued antidote to defeatist accounts of Western decline, this book tells the story of how liberal individualism has become the leitmotif of the American Tianxia, an emerging world-system in which people of all nationalities seek a share in the economic, cultural, and political system that is America writ large.

The legitimisation of clicktivism

Article

Dec 2017

Max Halupka

Is clicking ‘Like’ on Facebook a legitimate form of political participation? Is changing your profile picture or sharing an online article politically meaningful? It is undeniable that such actions can be politically-themed, but whether they amount to what we term ‘political participation’ remains contentious. This article explores the legitimacy of clicktivism as a political act, arguing that legitimacy be understood as multifaceted. To this end, the paper develops a series of lenses by which to explore the theoretical boundaries of these emerging actions. These are: the adherence of the action to tradition avenues; the acceptance of the action, and belief in that action; and, the intentionality of the action, and the context in which it is situated.

‘Lawfare’, US military discourse, and the colonial constitution of law and war

Article

Nov 2017

Freya Irani

In this article, I aim to reorient debates, in International Relations and Law, about the relationship between law and war. In the last decade, writers have challenged common understandings of law as a limit on, or moderator of, warfare. They have instead claimed that law is often used as a ‘weapon of warfare’, describing such uses as ‘lawfare’. Below, rather than arguing that law is either a constraint on or an enabler of warfare, I examine how law comes to be represented as such. Specifically, I examine representations, primarily by US military and other governmental lawyers, of ‘non-Western’ invocations of the laws of war, which seek to constrain the policies or practices of the US or Israeli governments. I show how these authors cast such invocations as not law at all, but as tools of war. I suggest that this move rests on, and reproduces, colonial discourses of ‘non-Western’ legal inadequacy or excess, which serve to render ‘non-Western’ law ‘violent’ or ‘war-like’. I show that the referents and boundaries of law and war are stabilised by notions of civilisational difference, which serve to give meaning to what law is, what war is, and whether particular claims or practices are understood as martial or legal.

The International Society – World Society Distinction

Chapter

Jan 2014

John Williams

International society and world society are both essential concepts for the English School. Alongside “international system,” they form its tripartite analytical framework. International society and world society contribute a distinctive sociological element to international relations (IR) theory. International society addresses the development, nature, and purpose of rules, institutions, and behavioral norms among states. World society adds non-state actors and offers a perspective focused on individual human beings and the idea of a global human community. However, world society is far less thoroughly investigated than international society in classic English School literature. This chapter focuses first on both their roles within the overall theoretical schema of the English School, including the analytical and normative significance attached to each concept. Secondly, the major areas of contention will be considered. Thirdly, in the light of the growing significance of world society, it will clarify how and why it is that international society and world society are increasingly seen as connected.

The Obama administration’s conceptual change: Imminence and the legitimation of targeted killings

Article

Jul 2017

Luca Trenta

Starting in 2010, the Obama administration engaged in an effort to justify drone strikes relying on the concept of ‘imminence’. The aim of this article is to understand the reasons behind such insistence and to assess the administration’s efforts at conceptual change. Building on Skinner’s and Bentley’s work, the article argues that the administration has followed an ‘innovating ideologist’ strategy. The analysis shows how waves of criticisms exposed the administration to a key contradiction between its rhetoric of change that emphasised international law and the need for aggressive counterterrorism. Reacting to this criticism, the administration has relied on imminence due to its connection with legitimate uses of force, while working to change the criteria for the concept, causing a shift away from imminent as ‘immediate.’ Reassessing Skinner’s place in IR, the article identifies conceptual change as a lens to assess foreign policy rhetoric and practice. The analysis emphasises the connection between actors’ intentions, beliefs, and practices. It highlights the importance of criticism in engendering contradictions, exploring why only some criticisms are confronted. Finally, the article develops an original typology of the limits confronted by the innovating ideologist and methods to assess whether the actor has respected them.

Globalization and the rise of integrated world society: deterritorialization, structural power, and the endogenization of international society

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