Anarchy is What the Balance of Power Made of It: Two Core Concepts and The Public/Private Distinction in International Relations
In this article, Morten Skumsrud Andersen questions a familiar assumption in International Relations (IR): that the balance of power and anarchy are mutually reinforcing concepts. He argues instead that this relationship is neither natural nor necessary. Modern understandings of anarchy do not reflect timeless features of international politics, but are historically contingent outcomes of changes in how the balance of power concept itself has been understood and deployed. Drawing on conceptual history, Andersen traces how the balance of power transitioned from a principle embodying Europe’s public interest in the eighteenth century to an expression of national rivalry and competitive self-interest in the nineteenth. This transformation was underpinned by a broader redefinition of the public/private distinction, which enabled states to be imagined as atomistic units operating in decentralized, market-like competition—what came to be seen as anarchy. By recovering the practical history of the balance of power, Andersen reinterprets the genealogy of two foundational IR concepts and call for greater reflexivity about the analytical tools through which international relations are theorized.
Taylor St John
Taylor St John is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research Group on Global Order and Diplomacy. Her research focuses on the politics and law of in...
Hierarchy
The concept of hierarchy refers to systems of vertical differentiation. Its broad meaning has many cognates both in social theory and in common parlance, such as rank, order, power, authority, status, and stratification. In International Relations (IR), the term is most famous for its opposition to a discipline-defining term: anarchy. Current uses of the term have been employed to challenge the states-under-anarchy framework as the starting point for IR theorizing. Explicit conceptualizations hierarchy in world politics define the term as either narrowly as relationships of authority relations that challenge state sovereignty or more broadly as the deeper asymmetrical structures that constitute those relations. Although the study of hierarchy (implicitly) is hardly new in IR, the novel push for studying it explicitly has sparked a wider dialogue about dynamics of vertical differentiation and renewed our disciplinary attention to the multiple inequalities that constitute world politics.
Caroline Saastad
Caroline Saastad was a master's student in the research group on peace, conflict and development in 2025. For her master's thesis, she examined th...
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