Stratified world-making in international relations: stratification, order, and power

This thesis develops an account of a phenomenon called ‘stratified world-making’ in international relations. This account takes its cue from sociological studies of social imagery, while also building on extant accounts of stratification in world politics. Specifically, stratified world-making draws our attention to how state actors in international relations are attempting to discursively naturalise, reify, and impose their preferred stratified ‘social pictures’ or stratified ‘model of international society’ upon certain contexts so that their immediate interests become more easily realisable. These stratified models of international society are the hierarchical ‘mental maps’ that shape how actors perceive and interpret how international society is stratified. These images position not just the self but also others in ways that allow stratified world-makers to pursue their interests more effectively. I provide a general account of the politics of stratified world-making, theorising three general, recurring varieties or strategies of this phenomenon, each consisting of a particular stratified model of international society. The first of these is ‘middling’, which sees an actor attempting to impose a vision of the world as tripartite, with the actor claiming they hold a position in the ‘middle’ of this society in order to break out of the disempowering category of the ‘lower’ stratum. The second strategy is ‘reverse othering’, wherein subordinate actors construct a world of manipulative, corrupt ‘haves’, which are contrasted with the weak, poor, powerless, yet humble and deserving ‘have nots’, in order to facilitate some concessions to the ‘have nots’. The third and final strategy is ‘flattening’, which involves actors claiming that the world is one of ‘equals’, often to reduce the ability of stronger actors to do what they want to weaker ones. I empirically illustrate and explore the logic(s) of each of these strategies using an emblematic historical case study. ‘Middling’ is explored through Australian and Canadian efforts to suggest the international system was not composed only of ‘great’ and ‘small’ powers but also ‘middle powers’ in the 1940s. I analyse ‘reverse othering’ by examining how developing states constructed the world in the 1974 Sixth Special Session at the UN General Assembly about a New International Economic Order. The dynamics of ‘flattening’ are studied using Latin American states’ efforts to codify ‘sovereign equality’ and its attendant rights as a principle of international law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The thesis makes a number of contributions to the literatures on stratification and stratified international orders. The first is the original conceptual framework and the three strategies of stratified world-making I identify. The second contribution qualifies conventional wisdom about the relationship between ambiguity and stratification. While existing accounts argue ambiguity can often be an obstacle to actors’ ambitions, my framework shows how the ambiguity, fuzziness, and indeterminacy of the social world also opens up opportunities for actors. Finally, the thesis opens up potentially fruitful pathways for practices of recognition and accommodation to satisfy the stratificatory ambitions of actors in world politics.

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