ikkenberry

Security Studies
ISSN: 0963-6412 (Print) 1556-1852 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20
Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of

Hegemonic Orders
G. John Ikenberry & Daniel H. Nexon
To cite this article: G. John Ikenberry & Daniel H. Nexon (2019) Hegemony Studies
3.0: The Dynamics of Hegemonic Orders, Security Studies, 28:3, 395-421, DOI:
10.1080/09636412.2019.1604981
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2019.1604981
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SECURITY STUDIES
2019, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 395–421
https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2019.1604981
INTRODUCTION
Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of

Hegemonic Orders
G. John Ikenberry and Daniel H. Nexon
ABSTRACT
After the end of World War II, various iterations of hegemony
studies focused on such topics as the connection between
hegemonic powers and the provision of international public
goods, the causes of war during hegemonic transitions, and
the stability of hegemonic orders. In this article, we discuss
and forward the emergence of a new wave of international
hegemony studies. This research program concerns itself with
the politics of hegemonic orders and hegemonic ordering. It
treats hegemonic orders as means, mediums, and objects of
cooperation and contestation. It sees hegemons as not simply
order makers but also order takers whose domestic political
processes significantly interact with the dynamics of inter-
national order. It incorporates insights about how different
dimensions of hegemonic orders interact to shape the costs
and benefits of hegemony. In short, it treats hegemony and
hegemonic orders as objects of analysis amenable to multiple
theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.
During his successful presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly

argued that the existing international order weakens the United States.
Previous American presidents and diplomats, he claimed, struck terrible
international bargains on trade, arms control, and alliances. He “made
clear that he sees allies as business partners, and relationships with them
in transactional terms: Pay up or we won’t protect you.”1 The irony of
Trump’s position was not lost on many analysts. As Thomas Wright
notes, “Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal
international order it helped to create and has led since World War II.”2
Since assuming office, Trump’s foreign-policy preferences have been, at
best, partially translated into concrete policy outcomes. But his routine
G. John Ikenberry is Albert G. Milbank professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and
Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. Daniel H. Nexon is an associate professor in the
School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University.
1
Michael McFaul, “Mr. Trump, NATO is an Alliance, Not a Protection Racket,” Washington Post, 25 July 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/mr-trump-nato-is-an-alliance-not-a-protection-racket/
2016/07/25/03ca2712-527d-11e6-88eb-7dda4e2f2aec_story.html?utm_term¼.f941c7d2524c.
2
Thomas Wright, “Trump’s 19th-Century Foreign Policy,” Politico, 20 January 2016, http://www.politico.com/
magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-foreign-policy-213546.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
396 G. J. IKENBERRY AND D. H. NEXON
disparagement of the basic orientations and commitments of American

hegemony and liberal order has produced significant doubts about
American leadership.
These doubts coincide with significant developments outside the United
States. The People’s Republic of China is now, by some measures, the
world’s largest economy. Under President Xi Jinping, China has grown
more assertive in its efforts to shape regional and global international
relations. Many observers view the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the
establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as parts
of a broader attempt to reorder international relations along Beijing’s pre-
ferred lines.3 Russia, meanwhile, has emerged as a more direct challenger
to important parameters of the current international order; Moscow uses
a variety of instruments to disrupt and undermine American hegemony
and liberal order.4 The European Union (EU) still suffers the aftershocks
of the 2008 Great Recession, now further complicated by the United
Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum and its subsequent triggering of the
Article 50 withdrawal process. Some see events in the EU as part of a
wider populist backlash against liberal international order.5
Hegemonic-stability and power-transition theories provide two venerable
frameworks for understanding these developments. They comprise part of
a broader family of theories of interstate hegemony.6 Such theories focus
on a particular kind of international hierarchy: those in which a leading
political community uses its outsized military and economic capabilities to
organize, at least in part, relations among weaker polities. In many
respects, Russian and Chinese behavior tracks well with the notion that
periods of power transitions generate increasingly assertive—and poten-
tially revisionist—behavior by other great powers; trends within the
“Western democracies” might similarly reflect contemporary shifts in mili-
tary and economic power.
Until relatively recently, these approaches have done more to establish
the parameters for such processes than provide direct insights into them.
For example, they do not tell us very much about the causes and
3
Astrid H. M. Nordin and Mikael Weissmann, “Will Trump Make China Great Again? The Belt and Road Initiative
and International Order,” International Affairs 94, no. 2 (1 March 2018): 231–49.
4
Roy Allison, “Russia and the Post-2014 International Legal Order: Revisionism and Realpolitik,” International
Affairs 93, no. 3 (1 May 2017): 519–43.
5
Ronald F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and
Cultural Backlash” (working paper, Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA, August 2016), https://www.hks.
harvard.edu/publications/trump-brexit-and-rise-populism-economic-have-nots-and-cultural-backlash.
6
For overviews, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981); Jacek Kugler and A. F. K. Organski, “The Power Transition: A Retrospective and Prospective Evaluation,”
in Handbook of War Studies, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Charles Kindleberger,
The World in Depression 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); John Gerard Ruggie,
“International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,”
International Organization 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 379–415.
HEGEMONY STUDIES 3.0 397
consequences of specific counter-hegemonic strategies.7 This is because

much of the explanatory and theoretical focus of traditional theories of inter-
state hegemony rests on a relatively narrow subset of issues. These issues
include the connection between the existence of a preeminent power and the
provision of international public goods, whether open trade or generalized
security; the relationship between power transitions and international con-
flict; and understanding alliance behavior within unipolar systems.
These debates, in turn, often pivot on the general factors that might con-
tribute to the stability of hegemonic systems—power asymmetries, legitim-
acy, threat, and the relative attractiveness of hegemonic order.8 This tends
to sideline not only analysis of the full range of strategies that actors use to
contest or uphold international order but also how variation within and
between hegemonic orders might shape power politics—at least beyond the
durability and stability of hegemonic systems.9 For similar reasons, they
confront problems when contemplating the possibility, highlighted by
Trump’s foreign-policy dispositions, that a hegemonic power may actively
aim to undermine the very order that it constructed.
A more recent wave of work focuses on these, and related, concerns. It
also reconfigures more traditional approaches to interstate hegemony. An
increasing number of scholars break from the impulse to treat hegemony
as an independent variable and system-wide war as the major outcome of
interest. Instead, they show interest in how hegemonic orders operate in
practice; how they produce opportunities and constraints for actors in
world politics; the dynamics of power-political competition within and over
order; and the mutually interdependent relationship between preeminent
7
See Karen J. Alter and Sophie Meunier, “The Politics of International Regime Complexity,” Perspectives on Politics
7, no. 1 (March 2009): 13–24; Benjamin Daßler, Andreas Kruck, and Bernhard Zangl, “Interactions between Hard
and Soft Power: The Institutional Adaptation of International Intellectual Property Protection to Global Power
Shifts,” European Journal of International Relations (2018): https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118768871; Brock
Tessman and Wojtek Wolfe, “Great Powers and Strategic Hedging: The Case of Chinese Energy Security
Strategy,” International Studies Review 13, no. 2 (June 2011): 214–40.
8
See, for example, Jonathan M. DiCicco and Jack S. Levy, “Power Shift and Problem Shifts: The Evolution of the
Power Transition Research Program,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, no. 6 (December 1999): 675–704; Gilpin,
War and Change; Robert Gilpin, “The Theory of Hegemonic War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4
(Spring 1988): 591–613; G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of
Order after Major War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kugler and Organski, “The Power
Transition”; David A. Lake, “Leadership, Hegemony, and the International Economy: Naked Emperor or Tattered
Monarch?” International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (December 1993): 459–89; Douglas Lemke and Suzanne
Werner, “Power Parity, Commitment to Change, and War,” International Studies Quarterly 40, no. 2 (June 1996):
235–60; Barak Mendelsohn, Combating Jihadism: American Hegemony and Interstate Cooperation in the War on
Terrorism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968);
Susan Strange, “The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony,” International Organization 41, no. 4 (Autumn 1987):
551–74; Stephen M. Walt, “Alliances in a Unipolar World,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (January 2009): 86–120;
William C. Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 5–41.
9
We risk overdrawing this claim for heuristic purposes. Gilpin, of course, points to a variety of factors that
explain the replacement of imperial cycles with hegemonic ones. And he provides analysis of the political
economy of specific systems, such as the Roman imperial order. See Gilpin, War and Change. Indeed, some
more explicitly Marxist approaches to hegemony also challenge this narrative to some degree. See Giovanni
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994).
powers and the orders they create, sustain, and seek to alter.10 Some
incorporate new ways of understanding international structures, and hence
of theorizing international order, such as in terms of networks, relations,
and social fields.11 Moreover, this “third wave” of scholarship includes
work that engages—whether implicitly or explicitly—with scholarship on
interstate hegemony but does not necessarily characterize itself as part of
the research program. Examples appear in the growing body of work on
international hierarchy12 and the politics of unipolarity.13
This project aims to consolidate and push forward this third wave of
scholarship on interstate hegemony.14 What are its overarching
characteristics?
The treatment of the politics of hegemonic orders as important in their

own right. This involves a greater focus on processes at work in hege-
monic politics and hegemonic ordering, such as the bargaining, contest-
ation, and cooperation that operates within hegemonic systems.
10
Ian Clark, “Towards an English School Theory of Hegemony,” European Journal of International Relations 15, no.
2 (June 2009): 203–28; Evelyn Goh, The Struggle for Order: Hegemony, Hierarchy, and Transition in Post–Cold
War East Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Stacie E. Goddard, “When Right Makes Might: How
Prussia Overturned the European Balance of Power,” International Security 33, no. 3 (Winter 2009): 110–42;
Seva Gunitsky, Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2017); Ikenberry, After Victory; G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins,
Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011);
Mendelsohn, Combating Jihadism.
11
Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012); Marina E. Henke, “The Politics of Diplomacy: How the United States Builds Multilateral
Military Coalitions,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1 June 2017): 410–24; Marina E. Henke, “The
Rotten Carrot: US-Turkish Bargaining Failure over Iraq in 2003 and the Pitfalls of Social Embeddedness,”
Security Studies 27, no. 1 (January–March 2018): 120–47; Paul K. MacDonald, Networks of Domination: The
Social Foundations of Peripheral Conquest in International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jeppe
Mulich, “Transformation at the Margins: Imperial Expansion and Systemic Change in World Politics,” Review of
International Studies 44, no. 4 (October 2018): 694–716; Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann, “Hegemonic-
Order Theory: A Field-Theoretic Account,” European Journal of International Relations 24, no. 3 (September
2018): 662–86; Thomas Oatley et al., “The Political Economy of Global Finance: A Network Model,” Perspectives
on Politics 11, no. 1 (March 2013): 133–53.
12
See, for example, Alexander D. Barder, “International Hierarchy,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International
Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), http://internationalstudies.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/
acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-95; David A. Lake, Hierarchy in International
Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Janice Bially Mattern and Ayşe Zarakol, “Hierarchies in
World Politics,” International Organization 70, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 623–54.
13
Walt, “Alliances in a Unipolar World.”
14
Neal G. Jesse et al. also describe three phases of hegemony. For them, the first wave “focused mainly on
international political economy (IPE)” and the problem of open “international economic systems,” the second
wave “emerged . . . after the end of the Cold War” and focused on the lack of balancing against the United
States, while the third wave concerns “the nature of the lead state’s interaction with others in the system.” As
the next section illustrates, we deviate somewhat from this rather neat division. For example, its periodization
cannot accommodate power-transition theory. But we should stress the broad similarities in our account,
especially with respect to the issues that they see as important in third-wave hegemony studies. See Neal
Jesse et al., “The Leader Can’t Lead When the Followers Won’t Follow: The Limitations of Hegemony,” in
Beyond Great Powers and Hegemons: Why Secondary States Support, Follow, or Challenge, ed. Kristen P.
Williams, Steven E. Lobell, and Neal G. Jesse (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1–32; quotes on 4,
6; Judith Kelley, “Strategic Non-Cooperation as Soft Balancing: Why Iraq Was Not Just about Iraq,” International
Politics 42, no. 2 (June 2005): 153–73.
The related emphasis on the analytical and causal significance of order

in the study of interstate hegemony. That is, we see recent scholarship
as correctly emphasizing hegemonic orders as means, mediums, and
objects of power politics.
An attempt to more firmly incorporate the insight that hegemons do
not simply supply international order for other actors. Rather, hegem-
ons find their foreign and domestic relations structured by the very
order that they help create and uphold. Hegemons are not just order
makers but also order takers.15
A focus on how the dynamics of hegemonic orders and hegemonic
ordering shape the costs and benefits of hegemony—as registered and
understood by the leading state, as well as other international actors.
Pursuing these wagers, we contend, works best when we embrace theor-

etical diversity, especially in terms of different ways of understanding inter-
national order. This better enables scholars of interstate hegemony to
unpack hegemonic orders into their constituent relations and practices;
study more granular processes of hegemonic ordering and counterordering;
take much more seriously the role of nonstate, transnational, and substate
actors in these processes; and incorporate a broader understanding of the
tactics, logics, and instruments through which states and other actors con-
test and uphold hegemonic orders.16
We use the phrase “hegemonic-order theory” to describe this third wave of
international relations hegemony studies. Doing so signals its distinctiveness
from hegemonic-stability theory, power-transition theory, and other particular
schools of hegemony studies. We find the term useful, in part, because of its
inclusive scope. It reflects not a repudiation, per se, of earlier frameworks but
their incorporation into a broader research agenda. It differs from some first-
and second-wave approaches in that it builds in no specific assumptions
about the consequences that follow from a system having a preeminent
15
As noted earlier, this insight is most advanced in Marxist-inflected understandings of hegemony. See Arrighi,
The Long Twentieth Century; Peter Burnham, “Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order,” Capital &
Class 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 73–92; Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the
Making of History, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). It also appears in some practice-
theoretic accounts. See Go, Patterns of Empire; Nexon and Neumann, “Hegemonic-Order Theory.”
16
Not all of these concerns receive attention in this issue, especially the role of nonstate actors. For cognate
arguments and examples, see Daniel Flemes and Leslie Wehner, “Drivers of Strategic Contestation: The Case of
South America,” International Politics 52, no. 2 (February 2015): 163–77; Stacie E. Goddard and Daniel H.
Nexon, “The Dynamics of Global Power Politics: A Framework for Analysis,” Journal of Global Security Studies 1,
no. 1 (February 2016): 4–18; Evelyn Goh, “Understanding ‘Hedging’ in Asia-Pacific Security,” PacNet 43 (31
August 2006): 31; Kai He, “Institutional Balancing and International Relations Theory: Economic
Interdependence and Balance of Power Strategies in Southeast Asia,” European Journal of International
Relations 14, no. 3 (September 2008): 489–518; T. V. Paul, “Soft Balancing in the Age of U.S. Primacy,”
International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 46–71; T. J. Pempel, “Soft Balancing, Hedging, and Institutional
Darwinism: The Economic-Security Nexus and East Asian Regionalism,” Journal of East Asian Studies 10, no. 2
(July 2010): 209–38; Tessman and Wolfe, “Great Powers and Strategic Hedging.”
power. Finally, as the preceding discussion makes clear, it takes very seriously
the analytical and explanatory importance of “order”—thus rendering
“hegemonic order,” rather than simply “hegemony,” its central concern.
In this introduction, we begin by looking back at prior waves, or phases,
of hegemony scholarship, with an emphasis on the study of interstate
hegemony in the United States. After this, we identify the theoretical and
empirical impulses that have begun to produce a third wave of scholarship
on hegemony. We then situate the articles within this wave.
The Study of International Hegemony: A Stylized History

As Perry Anderson notes, “The origins of the term hegemony are Greek,”
and, as “an abstract noun, hegemonia first appears in Herodotus, to designate
leadership of an alliance of city-states for a common military end, a position
of honour accorded to Sparta in resistance to the Persian invasion of
Greece.”17 A broadly similar concept appears in ancient China to describe
military leadership of city-state leagues: the “ruler of the dominant state was
given the title of ‘senior’ or ‘hegemon’ (ba) by the Zhou king, who charged
him to defend what was left of the Zhou realm. Formally these leagues were
hierarchical groupings of independent states, bound together through
treaties” that were, in turn, affirmed by historically specific practices.18
Whatever the terminology, these two examples suggest that the basic
idea of a hegemonic power likely appears in a variety of historical settings;
hegemony probably constitutes a ubiquitous feature of international rela-
tions, broadly understood.19
We find a number of different strands of research devoted explicitly to the
study of hegemony in postwar anglophone international relations theory.
These include not only hegemonic-stability and power-transition theory,
which constitute our immediate focus, but also, for example, English School
and neo-Gramscian variants.20 Of these, neo-Gramscian approaches prove
17
Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 1.
18
Mark Edward Lewis, “The City-State in Spring-and-Autumn China,” in A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State
Cultures, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen, Denmark: C. A. Reitzals Forlag, 2000), 365; See also
Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77n49.
19
For example, pro-Habsburg propaganda asserted that Latin Christendom needed monarchia to guarantee
peace, as well as guard against heretics and infidels. Their opponents charged that unchecked Habsburg
leadership would, in practice, represent a “mere tyranny,” an “unchristian slavery.” A similar rhetorical battle
developed as Bourbon power waxed nearly a century later. Thus, David Armitage notes that “apprehensions
that one European power was aiming at universal monarchy could be used to inspire others to ally against
the potential aggressor, so that what began as an analytical theory of empire ultimately became a justification
for defensive aggression within Europe.” This duel between notions of hegemonic stability and of the balances
of power, albeit stripped of much of its explicit normative content, remains a key division in contemporary
realist theory. Franz Bosbach, “The European Debate on Universal Monarchy,” in Theories of Empire, 1450–1800,
ed. David Armitage (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 89–90; David Armitage, “Introduction,” in Theories of
Empire, 1450–1800, ed. David Armitage (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), xx.
20
Anderson provides a reflective genealogy that takes up many of these strands. See Anderson, The H-Word.
the most distinctive; we return to them in the penultimate section. Most

international relations frameworks for studying hegemony focus on relations
among states and other political communities. Many see international politics
as marked by the rise and decline of dominant powers. Some emphasize
processes of economic change, some political dynamics, and some both.21
We focus on the study of interstate hegemony as it developed in the
United States. While the English School clearly theorized hegemony and
cognate concepts, it is only in the most recent wave of hegemony studies
that scholars working in that tradition have really excavated those concepts
and brought them into dialog with hegemonic-stability and power-transi-
tion traditions.22 In the United States, theoretical questions about the func-
tioning of the world economy and the logic and character of American
global leadership initially drove the study of interstate hegemony. This lit-
erature has gone through several phases.23
The first phase of work offered structural arguments about material capa-
bilities and system outcomes. In its hegemonic-stability variant, it argued
that the provision of international public goods required the existence of a
leading state—one both willing and able to act as an international quasi gov-
ernment and deploy its superior economic and military resources to create
those goods. The most basic form of the theory argued that, first, open-trade
regimes were international public goods and, second, that they depended on
a hegemonic power. In early formulations, the United Kingdom adopted this
role with the repeal of its Corn Laws and its use of carrots and sticks of
open (formerly closed) economic systems. During the interwar period,
London attempted to play a similar role but lacked the capacity to do so.
After 1945, the United States replaced the United Kingdom as an
21
Compare Adam Watson’s “pendulum” model or long-cycle theory. See Adam Watson, The Evolution of
International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2009); George Modelski, “The
Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no. 2 (April
1978): 214–35.
22
See Clark, “Towards an English School Theory of Hegemony”; Goh, The Struggle for Order. Goh discusses
English School approaches in this issue. See Evelyn Goh, “Contesting Hegemonic Order: China in East Asia,”
Security Studies 28, no. 3 (June–July 2019): 614–44.
23
This focus comes with costs, which we readily acknowledge. In particular, it is obviously parochial. As the
preceding implies, we see ample room for more global genealogies of the study of interstate hegemony.
Unfortunately, we are not qualified to tell such stories. See, for example, Amitav Acharya, “Global International
Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 2014): 647–59; Peter
Fibiger Bang, “Lord of All the World—The State, Heterogeneous Power and Hegemony in the Roman and
Mughal Empires,” in Tributary Empires in Global History, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang and C. A. Bayly (New York:
Springer, 2011), 171–92; David C. Kang, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Emilian Kavalski, “Relationality and Its Chinese Characteristics,” China
Quarterly 226 (June 2016): 551–59; Manjeet S. Pardesi, “Mughal Hegemony and the Emergence of South Asia
as a ‘Region’ for Regional Order-Building,” European Journal of International Relations (2018): https://doi.org/10.
1177/1354066118761537; Nicola Spakowski, “China in the World: Constructions of a Chinese Identity in the
Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” in Trans-Pacific Interactions: The United States and China,
1880–1950, ed. Vanessa K€ unnemann and Ruth Mayer (New York: Springer, 2009), 59–81; Wang Yuan-kang,
“Managing Regional Hegemony in Historical Asia: The Case of Early Ming China,” Chinese Journal of
International Politics 5, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 129–53; Yaqing Qin, “A Relational Theory of World Politics,”
International Studies Review 18, no. 1 (March 2016): 33–47.
international hegemon. It played the critical role in establishing—and main-

taining—the Bretton Woods system, including the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the collection of international banks that became the World
Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).24
This research program also incorporated more expansive understandings
of public goods. These included the absence of great-power war and the
provision of security. In Robert Gilpin’s critical formulation, dominant
powers set the rules of the game for their systems: They allocate status and
prestige, regulate the terms of foreign policy, and underwrite the economic
order. Hegemonic powers pursue these policies not out of altruism but
rather a desire to mold and maintain an international system that serves
their interests and values.25
The Cold War period also saw the parallel development of power-transi-
tion theory.26 It held that the typical and most stable distribution of power
involved a dominant actor standing atop a “pyramid of power.” The pre-
eminent power’s clear priority deters lower-tier states from initiating
major-power wars. It also renders the preeminent power secure enough to
avoid initiating such conflicts. Major-power, system-wide wars occur dur-
ing power transitions: when a rising power with revisionist orientations
attained enough power to threaten the dominant power. In power-transi-
tion theory, system-wide wars begin either when the declining power
launches a preventive war against the rising one or when the challenger
feels confident enough to initiate such a war itself. The result is major-
power conflict that either ends with a new leading power or the reestablish-
ment of the incumbent as a dominant power.27
24
Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929–1939; Michael C. Webb and Stephen D. Krasner, “Hegemonic
Stability Theory: An Empirical Assessment,” Review of International Studies 15, no. 2 (April 1989): 183–98.
25
Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. For an earlier discussion linking dominant powers to ideological
order, see Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1946). For theoretically
rich treatments of status in world politics, see Rebecca Adler-Nissen, “Stigma Management in International
Relations: Transgressive Identities, Norms, and Order in International Society,” International Organization 68, no.
1 (January 2014): 143–76; Joslyn Barnhart, “Status Competition and Territorial Aggression: Evidence from the
Scramble for Africa,” Security Studies 25, no. 3 (July–September 2016): 385–419; Marina G. Duque, “Recognizing
International Status: A Relational Approach,” International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 2018):
577–92; Lilach Gilady, The Price of Prestige: Conspicuous Consumption in International Relations (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2018); Steven Michael Ward, “Lost in Translation: Social Identity Theory and the
Study of Status in World Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 2017): 821–34.
26
Which clearly has antecedents. See, for example, John Bakeless, The Economic Causes of Modern War: A Study
of the Period: 1878–1918 (Moffat, Yard & Company, 1921), 7–8.
27
Douglas Lemke, Regions of War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Douglas Lemke,
“Great Powers in the Post–Cold War World: A Power Transition Perspective,” in Balance of Power: Theory and
Practice in the 21st Century, ed. T. V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2004); Douglas Lemke and Suzanne Werner, “Power Parity, Commitment to Change, and
War,” International Studies Quarterly 40, no. 2 (June 1996); A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1958); A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
A comprehensive treatment of this wave would require attention to theories of international leadership and
long-cycle theory: George Modelski and William R. Thompson, “Long Cycles and Global War,” in Handbook of
War Studies, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989); George Modelski and William R.
Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Economics and Politics (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
The major differences between hegemonic-stability and power transition

theory ultimately proved methodological in character. Hegemonic-stability
theory was rooted in qualitative approaches, power-transition theory in
statistical analysis. Over time, the two approaches basically converged on
the same principles, problems, and understandings of international politics.
And this convergence occurred despite the former being embedded in real-
ist theory, whereas the latter sometimes characterized itself in opposition
to realism.28
By the late 1980s and 1990s, however, hegemonic-stability theory looked
like it was running out of steam. Concerns about Japan, in particular, over-
taking the United States prompted work that echoed aspects of hegemonic-
stability and power-transition theory,29 but the winding down of the Cold
War shifted attention to other issues, such as role of ideas in world politics.
Many realists had, by this time, already adopted Kenneth N. Waltz’s struc-
tural-realist theory as their baseline for understanding world politics.30
Structural realism sees balances of power, rather than hegemonic prepon-
derance, as the “natural” equilibrium of international politics. It predicts
that attempts to establish or maintain hegemony will falter in the face of
counterbalancing pressures. Whatever the reason—structural realism’s com-
parative theoretical elegance, disciplinary sociology, or its usefulness as a
foil for liberal and constructivist theorists—it colonized much of realist the-
orizing at the expense of hegemonic-stability theory.31
At the same time, liberals argued that hegemons were unnecessary for
the creation of robust international regimes and international order. Some
scholars found it increasingly difficult to identify the existence of public
goods putatively supplied by hegemons. Other empirical anomalies accu-
mulated. Constructivists questioned the link between dominant powers and
particular outcomes, such as open-trade regimes. And a variety of theorists
28
Cf. DiCicco and Levy, “Power Shift and Problem Shifts”; for formal elaborations, see Alexandre Debs and Nuno
P. Monteiro, “Known Unknowns: Power Shifts, Uncertainty, and War,” International Organization 68, no. 1
(January 2014): 1–31; Robert Powell, “Uncertainty, Shifting Power, and Appeasement,” American Political
Science Review 90, no. 4 (December 1996): 749–64; Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and
Strategies in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
29
See, especially, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from
1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).
30
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
31
William C. Wohlforth, “Gilpinian Realism and International Relations,” International Relations 25, no. 4
(December 2011): 499–511. Scholars sometimes characterized Gilpin and Waltz as “neorealists.” Gilpin spends
significant time grappling with Waltz’s framework, which he characterizes as an oligopolistic model of
international order. Gilpin’s richer understanding of international politics was also pushed toward the margin
by a shift away from realist and Marxist approaches to international political economy (IPE) in the United
States after the Cold War. It also likely suffered from its very richness in an era marked by increasing emphasis
on theoretical simplicity and falsifiability. Still, some realists argued that the end of the Cold War vindicated
power-transition accounts. See Randall L. Schweller and William C. Wohlforth, “Power Test: Evaluating Realism
in Response to the End of the Cold War,” Security Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 60–107.
challenged the internal logic of a theory that predicted both that hegemonic
powers would supply international order and that supplying that inter-
national order would ultimately undermine their preeminent position.32
The Revival of Hegemony Studies and the Emergence of New Frameworks

Although work on hegemonic-stability and power-transition theories con-
tinued throughout the 1990s, the apparent durability of American-led uni-
polarity helped reinvigorate hegemony studies in the wider international
relations field. In an influential article on unipolarity, William C.
Wohlforth argued that unipolar systems are, in fact, more stable than bipo-
lar or multipolar ones.33 Both separately and together, Daniel Deudney and
G. John Ikenberry developed arguments about American leadership and
liberal order.34 Ikenberry’s After Victory put forth a modified version of
hegemonic-stability theory that captured widespread attention.35 The dis-
pute over “soft balancing”—that is, nonmilitary or partial efforts that states
might use in the face of a potentially threatening and possibly revisionist
hegemonic power—reflected a developing focus on how power-political
dynamics might operate in systems with a preeminent power.36 English
School theorists explored how to integrate hegemony as a primary, or per-
haps secondary, institution of international society.37 And a variety of
32
See Joanne Gowa, “Rational Hegemons, Excludable Goods, and Small Groups: An Epitaph for Hegemonic
Stability Theory?” World Politics 41, no. 3 (April 1989): 307–24; Isabelle Grunberg, “Exploring the ‘Myth’ of
Hegemonic Stability,” International Organization 44, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 431–77; Robert O. Keohane, After
Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984); Lake, “Leadership, Hegemony, and the International Economy”; Ruggie, “International Regimes,
Transactions, and Change”; Duncan Snidal, “The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory,” International
Organization 39, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 579–614; Webb and Krasner, “Hegemonic Stability Theory.” For more
recent criticisms, see Margit Bussmann and John R. Oneal, “Do Hegemons Distribute Private Goods? A Test of
Power-Transition Theory,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 1 (February 2007): 88–111; Richard Ned Lebow
and Benjamin Valentino, “Lost in Transition: A Critical Analysis of Power Transition Theory,” International
Relations 23, no. 3 (September 2009): 389–410.
33
Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World.”
34
Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order,” Review of
International Studies 25, no. 2 (April 1999): 179–96.
35
Ikenberry, After Victory; Randall L. Schweller, “The Problem of International Order Revisited: A Review Essay,”
International Security 26, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 161–86. For a symposium of reflections on After Victory and the
debates it engaged and inspired, see British Journal of Politics and International Affairs 21, no. 1
(February 2019).
36
See Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Hard Times for Soft Balancing,” International Security 30, no.
1 (Summer 2005): 72–108; Kai He and Huiyun Feng, “If Not Soft Balancing, Then What? Reconsidering Soft
Balancing and US Policy toward China,” Security Studies 17, no. 2 (April–June 2008): 363–95; Neal Jesse et al.,
“The Leader Can’t Lead When the Followers Won’t Follow”; Kelley, “Strategic Non-Cooperation as Soft
Balancing”; Robert A. Pape, “Soft Balancing against the United States,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer
2005): 7–45; Paul, “Soft Balancing in the Age of U.S. Primacy”; T. V. Paul, “Introduction: The Enduring Axioms
of Balance of Power Theory and Their Contemporary Relevance,” in Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in
the 21st Century, ed. T. V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2004), 1–25.
37
Clark, “Towards an English School Theory of Hegemony”; Mendelsohn, Combating Jihadism.
scholarship questioned the strength of the balance-of-power mechanism

altogether.38
Such work responded to concrete developments beyond the apparent
durability of American unipolarity. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the
United States, the American-led intervention in Iraq, and the Bush admin-
istration’s justification for the war through a doctrine of “preemption” all
played a role.39 These events turned a spotlight on questions of hegemony
and international order. Was the Bush administration turning revisionist
against the existing order? The lack of traditional balancing by second-tier
powers in Europe and Asia sparked the debate over soft balancing. At the
same time, related talk of an “American Empire” drove renewed interest in
the nature and dynamics of imperial orders—and not just among inter-
national relations scholars. In particular, scholars expended significant
effort on how to differentiate between empires and hegemons, which led to
new attention to the concept of hegemony.40
We see this second phase of interstate hegemony studies as transitional.
Its central concern remained the stability of hegemonic orders, including
under what conditions states turn revisionist against the order or balance
against the hegemonic power, and whether hegemons faced inevitable
decline from the costs of providing public goods. Thus, attempts to elabor-
ate the nature of American-led liberal international order focused on
debates, for example, about whether characteristics of that order make it
particularly attractive to potential challengers.41 However, efforts to distin-
guish among kinds of hegemonic orders, as well as the renewed attention
on empires and imperial relations, brought variation in their texture and
38
Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., The Balance of Power in World History (New
York: Palgrave, 2007); Jack S. Levy, “What Do Great Powers Balance Against and When?” in Balance of Power:
Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, ed. T.V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortman (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 29–51. For an overview, see Daniel H. Nexon, “The Balance of Power in the
Balance,” World Politics 61, no. 2 (April 2009): 330–59.
39
G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Ambition,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 5 (September/October 2002): 44–60.
40
See Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (New
York: Routledge, 2009); Alexander D. Barder, Empire Within: International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories
of Governance (New York: Routledge, 2015); Terry Boswell, “American World Empire or Declining Hegemony,”
Journal of World-Systems Research 10, no. 2 (2004): 516–24; Yale H. Ferguson, “Approaches to Defining ‘Empire’
and Characterizing United States Influence in the Contemporary World,” International Studies Perspectives 9, no.
3 (August 2008): 272–80; G. John Ikenberry, “Liberalism and Empire: Logics of Order in the American Unipolar
Age,” Review of International Studies 30, no. 4 (October 2004): 609–30; Daniel H. Nexon and Thomas Wright,
“What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 2 (May 2007):
253–71; Marc J. O’Reilly and Wesley B. Renfro, “Evolving Empire: America’s ‘Emirates’ Strategy in the Persian
Gulf,” International Studies Perspectives 8, no. 2 (May 2007): 137–51; Miriam Prys and Stefan Robel, “Hegemony,
Not Empire,” Journal of International Relations and Development 14, no. 2 (April 2011): 247–79; Jennifer
Sterling-Folker, “The Emperor Wore Cowboy Boots,” International Studies Perspectives 9, no. 3 (Augst
2008): 319–30.
41
Interestingly, participants in these debates sometimes sought, in essence, to synthesize hegemonic-stability
and structural-realist strands of realism. That is, to bring together “hegemony” and “balance-of-power” realism.
Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), chap. 2; see also
Liu Feng and Zhang Ruizhuang, “The Typologies of Realism,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 1, no. 1
(July 2006): 129–30.
dynamics into the analytical spotlight. Similarly, arguments about soft bal-
ancing turned attention to, first, a broader range of strategies by which
states might influence hegemons and hegemonic orders, and, second, how
they might use nonmilitary instruments to pursue those strategies. Thus,
the second wave pushed the study of interstate hegemony in directions
beyond its initial concerns.
At the leading edge of this transition between second- and third-wave
hegemony studies sits important work on the political economy of hegem-
ony. For example, roughly a decade ago Michael Mastanduno and Carla
Norrlof stressed the dynamic interactions between American domestic pol-
icy (particularly its deficit spending), its efforts to order international secur-
ity, and international political economy.
Mastanduno argued that “since at least the 1970s the United States has
urged its economic partners to serve as alternative engines of economic
growth. The fact that Asian economies, led by Japan and China, have
begun to take up that challenge is desirable for the world economy but not
for U.S. leverage.” Indeed, as “China, Japan, and other Asian states become
less dependent on the U.S. market and more on their domestic and
regional markets, they have less need to finance U.S. deficits by accumulat-
ing dollars to hold down the values of their own currencies to facilitate
transpacific export promotion.”42
On the other hand, Carla Norrlof argued that the United States can, and
did, leverage its provision of public goods into greater hegemonic power,
in part because Washington could threaten to shift away from providing
public goods and toward club goods. Norrlof demonstrated that American
monetary power actually increased, rather than diminished, after the
decline of the Bretton Woods system—a period which the conventional
wisdom interpreted as marking a major erosion of American hegemony.43
More broadly, in examining how American-led ordering in domains
such as the international monetary system, trade, and security could mutu-
ally reinforce one another, Norrlof called attention to the possibility of
positive feedbacks that can sustain hegemony. At the same time,
Mastanduno, Norrlof, and other participants in this wave of research
pointed to the need to view international order as a complex of distinctive
42
See Michael Mastanduno, “System Maker and Privilege Taker: U.S. Power and the International Political
Economy,” World Politics 6, no. 1 (January 2009): 152.
43
See Carla Norrlof, “Strategic Debt,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 2 (June 2008): 411–35; Carla
Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage: US Hegemony and International Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); Carla Norrlof, “Dollar Hegemony: A Power Analysis,” Review of International Political
Economy 21, no. 5 (September 2014): 1042–70; Carla Norrlof and William C. Wohlforth, “Is US Grand Strategy
Self-Defeating? Deep Engagement, Military Spending and Sovereign Debt,” Conflict Management and Peace
Science (2 November 2016): https://doi.org/10.1177/0738894216674953. See also Carla Norrlof and William C.
Wohlforth, “Raison de l’Hegemonie (The Hegemon’s Interest): Theory of the Costs and Benefits of Hegemony,”
Security Studies 28, no. 3 (June–July 2019): 422–50.
but interacting systems, while also calling more attention to the interaction
between American domestic political economy and hegemonic ordering.44
Indeed, the feedbacks involved might even prove destabilizing, in
unanticipated ways, for international order. For example, Micha€el Aklin
and Andreas Kern argue that America troop deployments signal a security
interest by the United States in stabilizing host countries. This, in turn,
leads host governments to engage in riskier economic policy and foreign
investors to accept that increased risk, on the assumption that Washington
will arrange for bailouts in the event of a crisis. Thus, US security commit-
ments might help drive recurrent economic shocks.45
The emergence of hierarchy-centric scholarship also plays an important
role in our story. The 2000s saw increasing momentum around the “new
hierarchy studies”: efforts to place patterns of super- and subordination at
the center of the study of world politics. A number of scholars argue that
the focus on anarchy distracted international relations theorists from vari-
ous forms of stratification’s critical importance in world politics. Such hier-
archies extend beyond asymmetries of military capabilities and the size of
national markets or national economies. They include an assortment of
forms of social stratification along, analogous to, or informed by, for
example, racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Moreover, realists usually dis-
count global governance as simply serving the interests of powerful states.
But many working in the new hierarchy studies see international regimes,
normative arrangements, and regulatory activities as not only relatively
autonomous from the interests and purposes of great powers but also as
generating, enacting, or manifesting international hierarchical relations.46
We suspect that, as in the case of revival of more general interest in
hegemony, hierarchy-centric scholarship emerged from a combination of
44
See also Richard W. Maass, Carla Norrlof, and Daniel W. Drezner, “Correspondence: The Profitability of
Primacy,” International Security 38, no. 4 (Spring 2014): 188–205; Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and
William C. Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment,” International Security 37,
no. 3 (Winter 2012/13): 7–51; Doug Stokes, “Achilles’ Deal: Dollar Decline and US Grand Strategy after the
Crisis,” Review of International Political Economy 21, no. 5 (2014): 1071–94; and Thomas Oatley, A Political
Economy of American Hegemony: Buildups, Booms, and Busts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
45
Micha€el Aklin and Andreas Kern, “Moral Hazard and Financial Crises: Evidence from American Troop
Deployments,” International Studies Review 63, no. 1 (2019): 15–29.
46
For key statements, see John M. Hobson and J. C. Sharman, “The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics:
Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change,” European Journal of International Relations 11, no.
1 (March 2005): 63–98; Mattern and Zarakol, “Hierarchies in World Politics.” See also Jack Donnelly, “Sovereign
Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power and International Security,” European Journal of
International Relations 12, no. 2 (June 2006): 139–70; David A. Lake, “The New Sovereignty in International
Relations,” International Studies Review 5, no. 3 (September 2003): 303–23; Meghan McConaughey, Paul
Musgrave, and Daniel H. Nexon, “Beyond Anarchy: Logics of Political Organization, Hierarchy, and International
Structure,” International Theory 10, no. 2 (July 2018): 181–218; Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann,
“Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3
(September 2006): 651–72; Ann Towns, “The Status of Women as a Standard of ‘Civilization,’” European Journal
of International Relations 15, no. 4 (December 2009): 681–706; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power
Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Ayşe Zarakol,
After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ayşe
Zarakol, ed., Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
disciplinary forces and external events. The growing crystallization of a var-

iety of theoretical frameworks—post-structural, practice-theoretic, feminist,
and so forth—played an important role. After all, these approaches are, in
many respects, theories of power relations and social stratification that go
beyond looking at the capabilities enjoyed by particular actors.47 Once
scholars see the world from these perspectives, it becomes difficult to
ignore myriad informal and formal hierarchical relations in world politics.
At the same time, the increasing presence of perspectives from the Global
South, as well as postcolonial theory, brought in scholars and theories for
whom anarchy often seems relevant, at best, only to relations among
great powers.48
But we should not discount the importance of the same developments
that drove greater interest in hegemony, empires, and other varieties of
interstate political domination. If scholars sought to build a research pro-
gram around hierarchy—when no such program, as such, existed—then
power-transition theory, hegemonic-stability theory, neo-Gramscian
accounts of hegemony, and other flavors of hegemony studies number
among the traditions available to yoke together. Indeed, theories of inter-
state hegemony have a continuous tradition of taking status hierarchies—
patterns of super- and subordination that involve social dominance—ser-
iously.49 Gilpin not only highlighted the allocation of prestige in his work
47
See, in particular, Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, “Power in International Politics,” International
Organization 59, no. 1 (January 2005): 39–75; For examples, see Rebecca Adler-Nissen, “The Diplomacy of
Opting Out: A Bourdieudian Approach to National Integration Strategies,” Journal of Common Market Studies
46, no. 3 (June 2008): 663–84; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (New
York: Routledge, 2013 [1984]); Didier Bigo, “Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices,
Practices of Power,” International Political Sociology 5, no. 3 (September 2011): 225–58; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas,
Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2014); Charlotte Epstein, “Who Speaks? Discourse, the Subject and the Study of Identity in International
Politics,” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (June 2011): 327–50; Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1
(New York: Vintage, 1978); Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Governmentality: Governing
International Spaces (New York: Routledge, 2004); Anna Leander, “The Power to Construct International
Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies,” Millennium 33, no. 3 (June 2005): 803–25; Vincent
Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016); Sending and Neumann, “Governance to Governmentality”; Laura Sjoberg, ed., Gender
and International Security: Feminist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); Cynthia Weber, “Queer Intellectual
Curiosity as International Relations Method: Developing Queer International Relations Theoretical and
Methodological Frameworks,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 1 (March 2016): 11–23.
48
For overviews, see Agathangelou and Ling, Transforming World Politics; Acharya, “Global International Relations
(IR) and Regional Worlds”; Sanjay Seth, ed., Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical
Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2013); Rosa Vasilaki, “Provincialising IR? Deadlocks and Prospects in Post-
Western IR Theory,” Millennium 41, no. 1 (September 2012): 3–22.
49
See Tudor A. Onea, “Between Dominance and Decline: Status Anxiety and Great Power Rivalry,” Review of
International Studies 40, no. 1 (January 2014): 125–52; Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevcehnko, “Status
Seekers: Chinese and Russian Responses to U.S. Primacy,” International Security 34, no. 4 (Spring 2010): 63–95;
Thomas J. Volgy and Stacey Mayhall, “Status Inconsistency and International War: Exploring the Effects of
Systemic Change,” International Studies Quarterly 39, no. 1 (March 1995): 67–84; Steven Ward, “Race, Status,
and Japanese Revisionism in the Early 1930s,” Security Studies 22, no. 4 (October–December 2013): 607–39;
Steven Ward, Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); William
C. Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (January
2009): 28–57.
but also argued that hegemonic systems display some characteristics of

domestic hierarchy.50 Power-transition theorists tend to dismiss the import-
ance of anarchy outright; they favor a hierarchical view of world politics.51
This synergistic relationship finds reflection in one of the most influen-
tial works of hierarchy-centric scholarship. David A. Lake’s Hierarchy in
International Relations breaks from hegemonic-stability theory in that it
emphasizes the provision of private goods rather than public ones. But it
otherwise theorizes something very much like an American-led hegemonic
order.52 A number of other works involve efforts to broaden and refine
insights from the study of hegemony via notions of international hier-
archy.53 But the new hierarchy studies also involve, as noted above, cognate
work on empire and imperial formations, as well as other forms of inter-
national hierarchy often incorporated into—but arguably undertheorized
in—hegemony studies.54
What all of this work has in common, in the broad sense, is an attempt
to break from the deterministic and simplified aspects of hegemonic-stabil-
ity and power-transition theories in favor of a richer analysis of order and
hegemony. Thus, earlier phases of scholarship shared at least a vague sense
that the structural-realist vision of a world of anarchy and balance did not
capture, at the very least, the political formation constituted by American
leadership. They agreed that it was, in at least some of its relations, more
hierarchical than anarchical. Some argued that it included more consensual,
cooperative, and institutionalized relations than approaches rooted in
anarchy expect. Others stressed its coercive—but stable—elements of super-
and subordination. Many argued that American leadership mixed together
a variety of different forms of hierarchy.
In the first wave of this scholarship, “hegemony” provided a good term
to use for this type of political formation. It was hierarchical but did not
generally take the form of traditional empire—rather, where it did resemble
empire, it was usually in an informal, attenuated version.55 Thus, in the
decades following World War II, as decolonization gathered steam, we
found hierarchy and order operating across and among independent, sover-
eign states that retained their own governmental decision making.
50
Gilpin, War and Change, 30, 228–30.
51
Lemke, Regions of War and Peace, 22.
52
Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations.
53
See Ahsan I. Butt, “Anarchy and Hierarchy in International Relations: Examining South America’s War-Prone
Decade, 1932–41,” International Organization 67, no. 3 (July 2013): 575–607; Detlef Nolte, “How to Compare
Regional Powers: Analytical Concepts and Research Topics,” Review of International Studies 36, no. 4 (October
2010): 881–901.
54
See Lake, “The New Sovereignty in International Relations.”
55
On the distinction, or the lack thereof, between empires and hegemons, see Boswell, “American World Empire
or Declining Hegemony”; Nexon and Wright, “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate”; Prys and
Robel, “Hegemony, Not Empire.” Note that the United States has long had, and retains, imperial possessions.
However, more recent waves of scholarship on hegemony and related

concepts recognize significant changes in world politics in the twenty-first
century. These changes trigger new questions about the logic and future of
American hegemonic order, both globally and regionally.56 They also open
up new perspectives that allow us to look back on the older eras of
American—and British—hegemonic leadership with the help of new frame-
works and new puzzles. The Bush Doctrine, with its rhetorical emphasis on
unilateralism and preemption, and its concrete interventions in
Afghanistan and Iraq, led to a new focus on not just counter-hegemonic
strategies but also the role of legitimacy in international leadership.57
Russia’s more recent interventions in Ukraine and Syria have led some to
see the return of traditional realpolitik along multipolar lines: “Whether it
is Russian forces seizing Crimea, China making aggressive claims in its
coastal waters, Japan responding with an increasingly assertive strategy of
its own, or Iran trying to use its alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to
dominate the Middle East, old-fashioned power plays are back in inter-
national relations.”58 The rise of China not only drives concerns about how
to understand the political consequences of contemporary power transi-
tions59 but has led to renewed interest in historical forms of Chinese
order-building.60
All of this suggests the emergence of a research program centered on the
politics of hegemonic orders. The advent of this wave owes much to con-
cerns about the fate of the current hegemonic order and the dynamics of
its contestation by means short of military conflict. It also derives from
developments within the field, including research trajectories suggested by
second-wave hegemony studies and by the rise of hierarchy-centric
56
Goh, “Understanding ‘Hedging’ in Asia-Pacific Security”; Goh, The Struggle for Order.
57
Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being a Unipole Isn’t
All It’s Cracked Up to Be,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (January 2009): 58–85; Stephen M. Walt, Taming American
Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
58
Walter Russell Meade, “The Return of Power Politics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers,” Foreign Affairs
93, no. 3 (May/June 2014), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141211/walter-russell-mead/the-return-of-
geopolitics.
59
Julia Bader, “China, Autocratic Patron? An Empirical Investigation of China as a Factor in Autocratic Survival,”
International Studies Quarterly 59, no. 1 (March 2015): 23–33; Gustavo A. Flores-Macıas and Sarah E. Kreps,
“The Foreign Policy Consequences of Trade: China’s Commercial Relations with Africa and Latin America,
1992–2006,” Journal of Politics 75, no. 2 (April 2013): 357–71; Tessman and Wolfe, “Great Powers and Strategic
Hedging”; Yong Wang, “Offensive for Defensive: The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s New Grand Strategy,”
Pacific Review 29, no. 3 (May 2016): 455–63.
60
Kang, East Asia Before the West; Yuen Foong Khong, “The American Tributary System,” Chinese Journal of
International Politics 6, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 1–47; Andrew Phillips, “Contesting the Confucian Peace:
Civilization, Barbarism and International Hierarchy in East Asia,” European Journal of International Relations 24,
no. 4 (December 2018): 740–64; Feng Zhang, Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in
East Asian History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Ji-Young Lee, “Diplomatic Ritual as a Power
Resource: The Politics of Asymmetry in Early Modern Chinese-Korean Relations,” Journal of East Asian Studies
13, no. 2 (August 2013): 309–36; Ji-Young Lee, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Ji-Young Lee, “Hegemonic Authority and Domestic Legitimation:
Japan and Korea under Chinese Hegemonic Order in Early Modern East Asia,” Security Studies 25, no. 2
(April–June 2016): 320–52.
scholarship’s interest in understanding the dynamics of complex hierarchies

in world politics.
Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Politics of Hegemonic Orders

Following Alexander D. Barder, we define international hegemony as “the
mobilization of leadership” by a predominant power to order relations
among actors.61 Hegemony is thus distinct from unipolarity, which refers
to systems in which a single great power lacks peer competitors.62
Hegemony is also distinct from hierarchy qua hierarchy, which refers, as
we have seen, to any kind of vertical stratification.63 Most hegemonic-order
theories, then, explore conditions in which a political community uses “its
superior economic and military capabilities—its position atop interstate
hierarchies in these domains—to create international order,”64 which is
“manifest in the settled rules and arrangements between states that define
and guide their interactions.”65
From this perspective, it follows that a great deal of the subject matter of
the new hierarchy studies, then, analyzes the hierarchical characteristics of
international orders—hegemonic or otherwise. Take the literature on infor-
mal empire. The relationship between the concept of “hegemony” and
“empire” has always been fraught. Many agree that hegemonic relations
describe patterns of leadership and control among nominally autonomous
polities; empires arise when constituent units no longer enjoy such nominal
autonomy. Hegemons putatively control the foreign relations of other polit-
ies, while empires impinge on their domestic politics.66
The problem comes with distinguishing between hegemony and informal
empire, which proves very difficult in practice. Even the ordering of exter-
nal relations among polities spills over into their domestic arrangements.
Some therefore conclude that “hegemony” is just a euphemism for
“empire.” Others suggest a variety of procedures for detecting when a hege-
monic relationship is really one of informal empire.67 But from our
61
Barder, “International Hierarchy.”
62
David Wilkinson, “Unipolarity without Hegemony,” International Studies Review 1, no. 2 (Summer
1999): 141–72.
63
Zarakol, Hierarchies in World Politics, 1; See also Jack Donnelly, “The Discourse of Anarchy in IR,” International
Theory 7, no. 3 (November 2015): 393–425; McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon, “Beyond Anarchy.”
64
Paul Musgrave and Daniel H. Nexon, “Defending Hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic
Capital and Political Dominance in Early Modern China and the Cold War,” International Organization 72, no. 3
(Summer 2018): 591–626, quote on 595.
65
Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 12. See also G. John Ikenberry, ed., Power, Order, and Change in World Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
66
Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 40.
67
The lack of clear distinction goes a long way back, per Anderson, The H-Word, 3; See also David A. Lake,
“Anarchy, Hierarchy and the Variety of International Relations,” International Organization 50, no. 1 (Winter
1996): 9. Some even consider “hegemony” another way of saying “empire.” See Niall Ferguson, “Hegemony or
Empire?” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 5 (September–October 2003): 154–61.
perspective, the degree to which relations among putatively autonomous

polities resembles that of empire is a question of order and ordering. That
is, hegemons may construct modes of relating with other states that are,
say, more imperial or more confederative.68
Putting Variation in Hegemonic Orders at the Center of Analysis

An emphasis on variation within and among hegemonic orders reflects a
growing trend in the study of interstate hegemony, albeit one, as we have
seen, with venerable roots.69 The articles in this issue take up this concern
in various ways. Evelyn Goh uses an English School framework to fore-
ground the texture of international order in our understanding of processes
of bargaining, adjustment, and contestation. Goh explicitly connects this
approach to insights drawn from the new hierarchy studies about the com-
plex hierarchies that make up international orders.70
Similarly, Alex Cooley focuses on the structural consequences of uneven
liberal ordering across western and central Eurasia. Cooley argues that we
should treat order as an ecology produced from both hegemonic and coun-
ter-hegemonic activities, and that this ecology, in turn, creates opportuni-
ties and constraint for contestation over order.71 Michael Mastanduno
examines variation in American postwar and post–Cold War hegemonic
regional orders, with a focus on “lynchpin” bargains—or lack thereof—with
regional powers.72
Drawing a sharper analytical distinction between, on the one hand, hege-
monic powers and, on the other, order, also allows scholars to examine
how international orders themselves shape hegemony and bids for hegem-
ony. Thus, F. Gregory Gause III points to the importance of variation in
the “international institutional context” for British and American domin-
ance in the Middle East in shaping the effectiveness of their power-political
efforts. Such insights forward the notion that hegemonic polities are both
order makers and order takers.73
Once we treat international order as more than a structural artifact or
systemic outcome, we can turn our attention to the bargains, institutions,
68
McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon, “Beyond Anarchy”; See Ikenberry, “Liberalism and Empire”; Alexander
Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Military Occupations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005).
69
See, for example, Ikenberry, After Victory; Charles A. Kupchan, “The Normative Foundations of Hegemony and
the Coming Challenge to Pax Americana,” Security Studies 23, no. 2 (April–June 2014): 219–57.
70
Evelyn Goh, “Contesting Hegemonic Order.”
71
Alexander Cooley, “Ordering Eurasia: The Rise and Decline of Liberal Internationalism in the Post-Communist
Space,” Security Studies 28, no. 3 (June–July 2019): 588–613.
72
Michael Mastanduno, “Partner Politics: Russia, China, and the Challenge of Extending US Hegemony after the
Cold War,” Security Studies 28, no. 3 (June–July 2019): 479–504.
73
F. Gregory Gause III, “‘Hegemony’ Compared: Great Britain and the United States in the Middle East,” Security
Studies 28, no. 3 (June–July 2019): 565–87.
and relations that constitute hegemonic orders. Hegemonic orders have an

architecture, manifest in the rules, norms, and arrangements stressed in
traditional hegemony studies; they also have an infrastructure made up of
interpersonal, interorganizational, and interstate political interactions. Both
the architecture and the infrastructure of international orders, including
hegemonic ones, are, at base, dynamic and malleable.
Hegemonic orders often take on characteristics that reflect a deep and
ongoing tension between consent and coercion, cooperation and contest-
ation. Thus, Mastanduno not only emphasizes variation within American
hegemonic order but focuses on the bargains and bargaining that undergird
it. Such political bargains—which include security and economic dimen-
sions—lie at the heart of hegemonic orders. Hegemons face major chal-
lenges in establishing order without, at minimum, the complicity of a small
group of secondary states who support their leadership, as well as the rules
and institutions of international orders.
These bargains, in turn, shape the legitimacy and functionality of hege-
monic orders. They create partners for the hegemon and reduce the likeli-
hood that secondary states will challenge, spoil, or undermine the order.
Mastanduno shows that the American hegemonic order during the Cold
War was essentially an aggregation of regional orders. These provided cir-
cumstances that facilitated tight partnerships with Japan and the Western
European states. In the post–Cold War era, the globalization of the
American hegemonic order fundamentally altered these circumstances.74 It
eroded old partnerships and bargains and altered the coherence and stabil-
ity of the American hegemonic ordering. Mastanduno’s approach to
hegemony places less emphasis on the hegemon’s ability to sustain inter-
national outcomes—such as free trade or stable monetary orders—and
more on the logic and mechanics of hegemony as a distinctive type of
regional or global international order.
A closer examination of the infrastructure and architecture of hegemonic
orders also helps tackle long-standing debates. One assumption at the heart
of traditional hegemonic theory holds that “systemic incentives” undergird
the building and maintenance of a hegemonic order. In Gilpin’s formula-
tion, the structuring of the rules and institutions of the international system
by a rising state provides “returns” to the hegemon—such as security,
growth, and prestige—that exceed the costs. But this notion has been
treated more as an assumption than a question or point of inquiry. Norrlof
and Wohlforth examine the costs and benefits of exercising hegemony and
look specifically at the conditions that affect the potential complementarity
74
On American bargaining with the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, see Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson,
“Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International Security
40, no. 4 (Spring 2016): 7–44.
between military protection and economic production. This question

takes on great urgency in the arguments of analysts who trace American
hegemonic decline to what they see as rising security costs and declining
economic benefits. But what precisely are the American costs and benefits
of hegemony? Norrlof and Wohlforth “provide a theoretical framework for
understanding the costs and benefits of hegemony with an emphasis on
the conditions that affect potential complementarity between military pro-
tection and economic production.”75 They find that social networks associ-
ated with military alliances can have a positive feedback effect on a
hegemon’s power position in ways that lower its leadership costs and
raise benefits.
Daniel W. Drezner explores that logic of resistance and revisionism in
response to the American hegemonic organization of the world economy.
The article looks at the strategies available to rising states as they seek to
challenge the existing order. Drawing on Susan Strange’s typology of
“structural power,”76 Drezner argues that the rational revisionist state
would attack the “ideational” dimensions of the existing hegemonic order
rather than pursue a frontal assault on its material dimensions. With this
framework, he looks at the actual strategies of rising challengers to the
American-led order: those of Russia and China. Russia has been the most
aggressive in challenging the rules and institutions of the hegemonic order,
but—precisely because it has sought to challenge all the major pillars of
the system—it has done so with only mixed results. China has pursued a
more indirect strategy, and it has not been very successful in advancing an
alternative ideology or normative vision of hegemonic order. The assump-
tion Drezner makes is that the greatest danger to the stability of the
American hegemonic order comes from the outside—from revisionist
states. But the instabilities to the order may be of a more complex sort,
involving political backlashes to slow growth, declining income, and global
economic downturns, triggering arrays of domestic and international
countermovements.77
Inderjeet Parmar argues that the ideational foundations of American
hegemonic order constitute one of its most critical—but neglected—fea-
tures. Behind the material capabilities of the United States lies what might
be called “ideational-infrastructural” power. This feature of hegemony man-
ifests in a diverse array of transnational elite knowledge networks, which
span the liberal-democratic world and beyond. Adopting a neo-Gramscian
75
Norrlf and Wohlforth, “Raison de l’Hegemonie.”
76
See Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
77
Daniel W. Drezner, “Counter-Hegemonic Strategies in the Global Economy,” Security Studies 28, no. 3
(June–July 2019): 505–31. Also see Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence,”
International Security (forthcoming).
approach, Parmar explores the way these knowledge networks tie states
together under American hegemonic leadership, legitimate power and
inequality, and manage conflict and cooperation. The article looks closely
at several examples of these elite knowledge networks, such as the
Kissinger/Salzburg Seminars, as they fostered transnational elite consensus
and helped manage conflict and challenges emanating from the Third
World. Parmar sees these elite networks as highly successful, capable of
generating stability even as the material distribution of power shifts and
domestic and international challengers to American hegemony—for
example, the Trump administration and China—become more salient.78
Theoretical Pluralism
The preceding analysis highlights another important aspect of the new
phase of hegemony studies: the embrace of a broader array of theoretical
frameworks and theoretical insights to examine the dynamics of hegemonic
orders. As noted above, Goh illustrates just this via an extension of English
School approaches to hegemony and international society. Another imme-
diate opportunity arises in bringing neo-Gramscian accounts of hegemony
more firmly into dialog with more realist-inflected alternatives. Such frame-
works, represented in this collection by Parmar, see hegemony as “a struc-
tural concept of power wherein the constitution of a stable order is the
result of a manufactured compatibility between dominant ideas, institutions
and material capabilities.”79 For them, the state takes a backseat to the
structure of social production and its dominant classes. Thus, the postwar
period created “the conditions for a hegemony of transnational capital by
restructuring production and finance within forms of state and securing
interests of new social forces at the level of world order through institu-
tions in the global political economy.”80
Neo-Gramscian approaches are significant for a number of reasons. They
provide one way of treating hegemonic states as both order makers and
order takers. They focus attention on more granular processes of hegem-
ony. Second, they expand our purview of relevant actors beyond states.
And they supply logics of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic strategies.81
While the field has seen some efforts to integrate, say, hegemonic-stability
78
Inderjeet Parmar, “Transnational Elite Knowledge Networks: Managing American Hegemony in Turbulent
Times,” Security Studies 28, no. 3 (June–July 2019): 532–64.
79
Burnham, “Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order,” 75.
80
Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, “The Gordian Knot of Agency—Structure in International Relations: A
Neo-Gramscian Perspective,” European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 1 (March 2001): 24.
81
See Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993); Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,”
Millennium 12, no. 2 (June 1983): 162–75; Christopher Chase-Dunn et al., “Hegemony and Social Change,”
Mershon International Studies Review 38, no. 2 (October 1994): 361–76. On counter-hegemonic strategies in
theory and neo-Gramscian accounts,82 we can likely gain much from more
concerted efforts. Drezner, while drawing more directly on the work of
Susan Strange,83 points in the direction of taking ideological hegemony
much more seriously in the study of interstate hegemony.84
There are a number of other promising approaches to theorizing inter-
national order. We mentioned these at the outset; they also include net-
work-analytic frameworks, which locate order in networks of financial
flows, institutional ties, alliances, and other relational structures of world
politics.85 Additionally, practice-theoretic accounts see international order
in terms of social fields.86 Scholars in both idioms have explicitly begun to
take up questions of hegemony and hegemonic orders. Norrlof and
Wohlforth deploy network analysis to help disentangle the question of
whether or not hegemony “pays” for the hegemonic power. Although none
of the contributors explicitly use field analysis, Gause engages with Julian
Go’s global-fields approach to understanding variation in patterns of
British and American interstate dominance. Cooley’s effort to parse vari-
ation in international order in terms of ecologies displays a family resem-
blance with both network-relational and social-field approaches.
Taking Contingency Seriously

Hegemonic-order theory, as we have noted throughout, breaks with more
deterministic approaches to interstate hegemony. It stresses the potentially
contingent character of the relationship between preeminent powers and
the order that is built by and around it. This point appears, of course, in
Charles Kindleberger’s classic study of failed hegemony—the United States
81
interstate politics, see, for example, Rosemary Foot, “Chinese Strategies in a US-Hegemonic Global Order:
Accommodating and Hedging,” International Affairs 82, no. 1 (January 2006): 77–94.
82
G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power,” International Organization 44,
no. 3 (Summer 1990): 283–315.
83
Strange, “The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony”; Strange, The Retreat of the State; Susan Strange, States and
Markets (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).
84
See also Ted Hopf, “Common-Sense Constructivism and Hegemony in World Politics,” International
Organization 67, no. 2 (April 2013): 317–54.
85
Stacie E. Goddard, “Embedded Revisionism: Networks, Institutions, and Challenges to World Order,”
International Organization 72, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 763–97; MacDonald, Networks of Domination; Paul K.
MacDonald, “Embedded Authority: A Relational Network Approach to Hierarchy in World Politics,” Review of
International Studies 44, no. 1 (January 2018): 128–50; Zeev Maoz et al., “Structural Equivalence and
International Conflict: A Social Networks Analysis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 5 (October 2006):
664–89; Oatley et al., “The Political Economy of Global Finance”; Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and
Alexander H. Montgomery, “Network Analysis for International Relations,” International Organization 63, no. 3
(July 2009): 559–92.
86
Larissa Bucholz, “What Is a Global Field? Theorizing Fields beyond the Nation-State,” in Fielding
Transnationalism, ed. Julian Go and Monika Krause (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 31–60; Julian Go,
“Global Fields and Imperial Forms: Field Theory and the British and American Empires,” Sociological Theory 26,
no. 3 (September 2008): 201–29; Go, Paterns of Empire; Musgrave and Nexon, “Defending Hierarchy from the
Moon to the Indian Ocean”; David M. McCourt, “Practice Theory and Relationalism as the New Constructivism,”
International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 2016): 475–85; Nexon and Neumann, “Hegemonic-Order
Theory”; Pouliot, International Pecking Orders.
was able but unwilling to provide leadership—and the coming of the Great
Depression.87 It formed part of John Gerard Ruggie’s critical intervention,
which pointed out that a counterfactual Nazi German hegemonic order
would have looked very different than the one that emerged after World
War II.88 Debates about what, say, future Chinese hegemony might look
like also highlight some degree of contingency in the nature of inter-
national order.89
But many of these approaches tend to assume that economic and militar-
ily superordinate powers will, eventually, take up a hegemonic mantle.90
This might be the case, but it requires much more critical interrogation.91
Paul Musgrave argues that the central pillar of American hegemonic
order—the United States itself and its domestic institutions—is weaker than
assumed by theory and empirical narratives. Musgrave criticizes theories of
hegemonic order precisely for assuming that “systemic logics” from the
outside world provide the impetus to bind the hegemon to its order, and
therefore create continuity and durability in hegemonic leadership.
Musgrave points out that these theories take for granted that domestic
institutions facilitate, or at least stay out of the way of, those international-
ist policies and commitments integral to hegemonic order.
Focusing on American political parties and electoral politics across the
twentieth century, Musgrave shows how problematic this assumption is.
Political parties—which stand at the center of American political institu-
tions—can create incentives that lead to the undermining of hegemonic
credibility from within. In particular, political partisanship and polarization
prove a persistent problem in the generation of consistent and credible
hegemonic leadership, which have emerged across the decades during times
of low external threat to impede and hamstring the functioning of
American hegemony. As Musgrave argues, this helps explain—reflected in
the Trump administration’s rejection of the hegemonic logic—that the
most effective anti-hegemonic force may come not from abroad but from
within the American domestic system itself.92
Putting the Hegemon Back into International Order

Hegemonic ordering takes place within existing international orders, which
creates opportunities and constraints for hegemonic powers. Furthermore,
87
Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929–1939.
88
Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change.”
89
See, for example, Nordin and Weissmann, “Will Trump Make China Great Again?”; David C. Kang, “Getting Asia
Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks,” International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 57–85.
90
Nolte, “How to Compare Regional Powers.”
91
For a key statement, see Wilkinson, “Unipolarity without Hegemony.”
92
Ideas and quote in the previous few paragraphs from: Paul Musgrave, “International Hegemony Meets
Domestic Politics: Why Liberals can be Pessimists,” Security Studies 28, no. 3 (June–July 2019): 451–78.
hegemons may find themselves constrained by elements of an international

order that they helped produce. This latter notion is critical to arguments
about whether or not the United States successfully bound itself to its own
order, and thereby made international order more legitimate for many (but
not all) states in the system.93 But hegemonic-order theories should aim to
take the interaction between international orders, hegemons, and hege-
monic ordering much more seriously. Hegemons rarely enjoy sufficient
power to completely overhaul order entirely. Even after World War II, the
United States bootstrapped order on prewar institutions and had to accom-
modate the influence and preferences of other states.
As noted above, Gause compares the British and American hegemonic
presence in the Middle East. Britain in the interwar period and America in
the post–Cold War period stood as unchallenged great powers in the
region. They attempted to organize regional politics, influence domestic
coalitions, support client states, and manage change across the Middle East.
Yet the experiences of the two hegemons differed: Great Britain had a
more (at least from its standpoint) successful experience than the United
States in sustaining its clients and preventing outcomes that ran counter to
its interests. Why is this? Gause argues that differences in hegemonic capa-
bilities, or even in the specific hegemonic strategies that the two great
powers pursued, fail to explain this variation. It instead stemmed from con-
textual variations in order, both in terms of the broader normative environ-
ment and the mobilization capacity of Middle Eastern states. Both factors
increased the costs of hegemonic policies. The success of hegemonic con-
trol is not simply a matter of what the dominant states seeks to do, or how
it does it. The character of the subject states and societies provide a critical
determinant of if, and how, hegemonic ordering play out.
Cooley examines similar dynamics in the former Soviet sphere. His art-
icle illuminates the limits and unstable hold that liberal ordering principles
and institutions have on Russia and its neighboring territories. In doing so,
it highlights not only the limitations of American hegemonic ordering at
its post–Cold War unipolar peak but also the dynamic interplay of hege-
monic ordering, international order, and counter-hegemonic strategies. As
Cooley argues, the “shallow institutionalization” in much of the former
Soviet Union “rendered the liberal order far more fragile than most initially
appreciated … Key to this effort was Moscow recasting these agents of
hegemonic order as threatening the stability of individual regimes and the
region itself. Beginning in the mid-2000s, in the wake of the Color
Revolutions experienced in the contested borderland states (Georgia and
Ukraine), Russia actively presented its own forms of counterorder as a basis
93
Ikenberry, After Victory; Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan.
for the post-Soviet states to reengage with the post-Soviet states with the
Russian sphere of influence.”94
Norrlof and Wohlforth call attention to the deep bidirectional connections
between the hegemon itself and international order. Although Musgrave
emphasizes the primacy of domestic politics, we could further explore how
the factors Musgrave identifies, such as party polarization, involve feedbacks
from international order and transnational politics. For example, some see
Trumpism as one manifestation of a transnational right-wing rejection of the
liberal order. They point to intellectual and interpersonal connections
between Trump’s supporters—including some in his inner circle—and self-
proclaimed anti-globalists, particularly in Europe. We are still learning the
extent to which Moscow aids and abets this right-wing backlash, whether
through direct assistance or information warfare.95 This kind of contention
over hegemonic order simply eludes traditional hegemony studies but may
form a crucial element of the political hegemonic orders.96
Challenges and Opportunities for Hegemony Studies

Most of the contributors to this issue focus on dynamics of American hegem-
ony, as well as challenges to it. This raises a perennial question: We know
that general interest in interstate hegemony rises and falls over time. Some
evidence suggests that hegemony studies peaks in the field during periods—
such as in the 1970s and 1980s—of apparent hegemonic decline.97 Of course,
if our stylized story is correct, the current uptick—the one that marked the
second major phase of interstate-hegemony studies and now carries us into
the third—started in the late 1990s with the sense that the “unipolar moment”
might prove more durable than expected and gathered momentum after
September 11, 2001, when Karl Rove could boldly proclaim of the United
States: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”98
Of course, we see no reason that hegemony and hegemonic orders are
only a matter for the rearview mirror. The next few decades will likely see
94
Cooley, “Ordering Eurasia.”
95
See John Lloyd, “The New Illiberal International,” New Statesman, 18 July 2018, https://www.newstatesman.
com/world/2018/07/new-illiberal-international; Mike Lofgren, “Trump, Putin, and the Alt-Right International,”
Atlantic, 31 October 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/10/trump-putin-alt-right-
comintern/506015/; Jonathan Capehart, “It’s Not Just Trump: With Brexit and France Votes, Russia is
Cultivating the Global Right,” Washington Post, 18 April 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-
partisan/wp/2017/04/18/its-not-just-trump-with-brexit-and-france-votes-russia-is-cultivating-the-global-right/
?utm_term¼.23ca98fbf26c.
96
If authoritarian states continue to make claims on, and seek to reorder, international politics, then we will
need parallel accounts about their political systems. We find it notable that the Soviet bid for hegemony
receives much less attention within hegemony studies proper.
97
We thank one of our referees for this point.
98
Karel van Wolferen, “Karl Rove’s Prophecy: ‘We’re an Empire Now, and When We Act, We Create Our Own
Reality’” (Global Research: Centre for Research on Globalization, 5 February 2017), https://www.globalresearch.
ca/karl-roves-prophecy-were-an-empire-now-and-when-we-act-we-create-our-own-reality/5572533.
continued contestation, adjustment, negotiation, and even conflict over

international order. This will prove the case if current trends continue and
erode American hegemony, or if they reverse and, say, the Chinese chal-
lenge goes the way of “Japan as Number One.”99 Hegemonic-order theories
will remain crucial to the study of world politics, whether at the global or
regional level, for the foreseeable future.
The remit of hegemonic-order theories extends beyond the contemporary
period and the fate of American hegemony. But third-wave scholarship on
hegemony should also provide important ways to cut into some persistent
and deep puzzles about the intrinsic and extrinsic character of American
leadership. These include a number of concerns, some of which are not
taken up directly in this collection, such as:
How much is the character of contemporary international politics and

world order a consequence of hegemony in general, and the specific
characteristics of the United States in particular—as opposed to deeper,
longer-term, and quite possibly autonomous developments, such as
industrial capitalism, globalization, and nuclear proliferation?
Once we treat international order and hegemony as relatively autono-
mous, how do we understand their interplay? Older approaches saw
successful power transitions as involving system-wide wars that “cleaned
the decks” of international order, but, for example, the new hierarchy
studies suggest a more complicated relationship among and across dif-
ferent dimensions of super- and subordination in world politics.
How do hegemonic orders create opportunities and constraints on
weaker actors, and therefore lead to different kinds of counterorder and
counter-hegemonic strategies? Can the order transform without the loss
of hegemony? Can particular orders persist with a shift in leadership,
and if so, under what conditions?
How does the architecture and infrastructure of hegemonic orders actually
function? Are there particular bargains that operate as “lynchpins” in hege-
monic systems, either with particular states or in particular sectors (eco-
nomic, security, etc.)? How do hegemons succeed or fail when it comes to
managing the complex relationships that undergird their orders? And what
about regional and sector-based variation in hegemonic orders?
At the risk of repetition, we term this the shift to hegemonic-order theo-

ries precisely to, on the one hand, emphasize the significance of taking the
“order” part of hegemony studies seriously and, on the other, signal a break
from deterministic and structuralist understanding of hegemony of the
99
Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, 1st Harper ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
kind associated with hegemonic-stability and power-transition theories.

Indeed, the first phase of interstate-hegemony studies failed to provide the-
oretically informed understandings of the architecture and infrastructure of
hegemony. The second phase started to take that architecture and infra-
structure seriously but focused on mechanisms of stabilization and the vari-
ables that accounted for stability. As we move into the third phase of
interstate-hegemony studies, we still lack good ways to link up, for
example, the study of that architecture, let alone its infrastructure, with
proliferating analyses of how weaker actors oppose or support preeminent
powers. This requires viewing “hegemonic order,” including in its
American guise, as a rich array of relations and articulated roles and evolv-
ing identities, which give hegemony its life and operation.
Seen in this light, the anomalies of hegemonic-stability theory—such as
the failure to identify international public goods or the inability to provide
coherent explanations for why hegemons might set in motion their own
decline—point to the need to take seriously this more complex understand-
ing of the internal architecture of roles, authority relations, and bargains
that make up hegemonic systems. It also calls for a renewed focus on how
hegemonic orders reconfigure the interests and domestic orders of partici-
pants. This includes not simply weaker actors, but hegemons themselves.
They not only structure international order but find themselves structured
by it. In this sense, hegemonic orders are not simply a reflection or crystal-
lization of the distribution of power. As complex hierarchies, hegemonic
orders are productive of power and power relations.100
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Princeton Institute for International and Regional
Affairs, Princeton’s Center for International Security Studies, and the Princeton Project on
the Future of Multilateralism for financial support. Funding for this project was also pro-
vided by the Norwegian Research Council under the project “Undermining Hegemony,”
project no. 240647. This article, and the project, received invaluable feedback from two
anonymous referees, the editors of Security Studies, and workshop participants. In addition
to the contributors, those participants included Jose Luis Rodrıguez Aquino, Daniel
Deudney and David Lake, who both provided crucial comments and suggestions.
ORCID
Daniel H. Nexon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4163-0450
100
Mattern and Zarakol, “Hierarchies in World Politics”; Zarakol, “Theorising Hierarchies: An Introduction,” in
Hierarchies in World Politics, ed. Ayşe Zarakol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1–14.

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Security Studies

ISSN: 0963-6412 (Print) 1556-1852 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20

Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of

G. John Ikenberry & Daniel H. Nexon

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2019.1604981

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Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of

During his successful presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly

disparagement of the basic orientations and commitments of American

consequences of specific counter-hegemonic strategies.7 This is because

The treatment of the politics of hegemonic orders as important in their

The related emphasis on the analytical and causal significance of order

Pursuing these wagers, we contend, works best when we embrace theor-

The Study of International Hegemony: A Stylized History

the most distinctive; we return to them in the penultimate section. Most

international hegemon. It played the critical role in establishing—and main-

The major differences between hegemonic-stability and power transition

The Revival of Hegemony Studies and the Emergence of New Frameworks

scholarship questioned the strength of the balance-of-power mechanism

disciplinary forces and external events. The growing crystallization of a var-

but also argued that hegemonic systems display some characteristics of

However, more recent waves of scholarship on hegemony and related

scholarship’s interest in understanding the dynamics of complex hierarchies

Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Politics of Hegemonic Orders

perspective, the degree to which relations among putatively autonomous

Putting Variation in Hegemonic Orders at the Center of Analysis

and relations that constitute hegemonic orders. Hegemonic orders have an

between military protection and economic production. This question

Taking Contingency Seriously

Putting the Hegemon Back into International Order

hegemons may find themselves constrained by elements of an international

Challenges and Opportunities for Hegemony Studies

continued contestation, adjustment, negotiation, and even conflict over

How much is the character of contemporary international politics and

At the risk of repetition, we term this the shift to hegemonic-order theo-

kind associated with hegemonic-stability and power-transition theories.

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