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...
Theory Seminar: Charles Roger on: What are international organizations? Where we go wrong and why our answer matters so much
NUPI is proud to welcome you to this theory seminar with Charles Roger on international organizations.
Rebundling sovereignty over local nature in global governance (RESOLVING)
How does the global governance of nature transform the exercise of sovereign power? ...
From the incoming editors: A leading International Relations journal with a Nordic touch
The new editors of Cooperation and Conflict introduce themselves and their aims for the journal going forward.
Re-gendering diplomacy (REGEND)
Why and how did official diplomacy become masculinized and practiced only by men? This is the core question motivating REGEND. ...
Stories we live by: the rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts
Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we risk closing down opportunities for different ways of imagining both the present and the future. In this article, we acknowledge the advances made in HIR over the last decades but suggest that a closer engagement with conceptual history would enhance its potential even further, making it possible to explore how a wider space of experience can also widen our horizon of expectations.