Abstract
AbstractThere is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan's (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.
Highlights
Introduction: evolving conceptualizations of world society Globalization has changed the human world in myriad ways, but it has done relatively little to change international relations theory’s focus on the state
Today, such global structures of social power are thick on the ground, yet international relations theory continues to underappreciate their potential to influence the structure of international society and the international system
If Bull (1977, 279–280) could admit forty years ago the importance of ‘the development of global communications creating an unprecedented degree of mutual awareness among different parts of the human community,’ how much more is this true today? Bull (1977, 280) doubted that the level of global ‘interdependence’ fostered by the communication networks of the 1970s was sufficient to support a true world society, but the social web, free global telecommunications, mass immigration, and frequent air travel seem to have put paid to that notion
Summary
Introduction: evolving conceptualizations of world society Globalization has changed the human world in myriad ways, but it has done relatively little to change international relations theory’s focus on the state. The primary institutions of (integrated) world society Buzan (2018) identifies three different meanings of the term ‘world society’ as it is used in the international relations literature.
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