The middling of international hierarchies

John de Bhal discusses the key arguments from his new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article here - The middling of international hierarchies

I began writing my recently published paper in the Review of International Studies because I noticed a pattern in how several actors were navigating hierarchy in the international system. I observed that numerous polities across time and space made claims to occupy “middle” positions in international hierarchies. Hierarchical categories such as “middle powers,” “Dominions,” and “Central Europe” had all been studied in isolation, but I noticed a shared underlying logic running through them—one that had not yet been conceptualised in general terms. These categories are typically treated as sui generis, yet all involve efforts to navigate international hierarchies by claiming a “middle” position within such hierarchies. The article is my attempt to make sense of this and connect the fascinating thread that I had noticed running through these seemingly unrelated categories. 

The paper theorises a phenomenon I term “the middling of international hierarchies.” This phenomenon consists of actors attempting to produce, occupy, and claim the “middle” position in international hierarchies. The article focuses on one pathway through which actors pursue this strategy: the invocation of “middle” categories. In theorising this phenomenon, we can remain agnostic about whether or not these “middle” positions “actually exist” and focus instead on why actors attempt to discursively produce, occupy, and claim such positions in the first place.

I zoom in on the strategic logics of the middling of international hierarchies to argue that actors engaged in middling seek to transform binary hierarchies into trichotomous ones, thereby producing and claiming the “middle” position within such hierarchies. In doing so, these actors distance themselves from those categorised in the lower rungs of the hierarchy without directly challenging those sitting atop international pecking orders.

As I have already alluded to, I developed these theoretical arguments inductively. In the paper, I flesh them out empirically by detailing the striking commonalities in how actors used particular “middle” categories. I do this through two vignette case studies. The first examines how the British settler-colonies developed and used the category “Dominion” to carve out a “middle” position within the British imperial hierarchy in the early twentieth century. The second vignette studies how the long-dormant category of “Central Europe” was repopularised and deployed by a handful of states to engage in middling in the late 1980s and onwards.

The methodological justification for studying these otherwise very different cases is that they allow me to pursue an “uncommon foundations strategy.” This is the first study that I am aware of that even considers the categories of “Dominions” and “Central Europe” in the same breath. Indeed, on the face of it, these categories appear to have very little in common; they were popularised and emerged in vastly different contexts. However, an uncommon foundations strategy sees these differences as an opportunity, not an obstacle, to theory development. Such a strategy posits that if similar analytical tools provide leverage despite these enormous differences, we can be more confident in the transferability of those arguments to other cases.

I hope others find the paper interesting and helpful for thinking about how actors navigate international social stratification more generally.  

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101137

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