Anarchy and IR Theory: A Reconsideration

Jonathan Havercroft

University of Southampton

Alex Prichard

University of Exeter

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue, we undertake a little ground clearing in order

to make room in IR for thinking differently about anarchy and world politics.

Anarchy’s roots in, and association with social contract theory and the state of nature

has unduly narrowed how we might understand the concept and its potential in IR.

Indeed, such is the consensus in this regard that anarchy is remarkably uncontested,

considering its centrality to the field. Looking around, both inside and outside IR, for

alternative accounts, we find ample materials for helping us think anew about the

nature of and possibilities for politics in anarchy. In the second part of the

introduction we show how our contributors develop and expand on these resources

and what we hope the special issue brings to IR.

Keywords

Anarchy, History of IR theory, Waltz, IR Theory,

Acknowledgements

The papers in this special issue are the culmination of two workshops on the subject

of anarchy in IR theory, convened at the University of Exeter in 2014 and at the

BISA@40 pre-conference Workshops, 2015. We are grateful to both institutions for

the funding to support these two events. The editors wish to thank the participants at

both events, the final list of contributors to this special issue, an anonymous reviewer,

and Patrick Hayden for his editorial support.

1
Introduction

What is anarchy? Despite its centrality to the self-image of the discipline of

International Relations (IR), few have critically enquired into the essence of this

concept. Most still deploy textbook definitions, namely that anarchy is the absence of

rulers, of a centralized authority, or a system of self-help. This basic understanding of

anarchy is largely uncontested. However, by contrast, the study of the purported

causal effects of anarchy, rather than the meaning of the concept itself, has arguably

shaped the evolution of the discipline over the last fifty years at least. Debates

between classical and neo-realists (Waltz 1979), and between neo-realists and neo-

liberals (Powell 1994), revolved around understanding ‘order without an orderer and

organizational effects where formal organisation is lacking’ (Waltz 1979:89).

The rejection of the terms of these two debates, including a rejection of

anarchy, was central to the evolution of normative and critical IR theory (Beitz 1979,

Linklater 1998). Anarchy was synonymous with statism, with the absence of morality,

and what Jo Freeman called, in a different context, ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’

(Freeman 1972), where hierarchies and domination proliferated in the absence of

formal institutions. Elsewhere, the analytical virtue of anarchy was itself questioned,

such that to focus on anarchy was itself a problematic collusion with the gendered and

Eurocentric legacies of modernity (Sjoberg 2012; Hobson 2014). Barry Buzan and

Richard Little (2001) argued that IR’s failure to speak beyond the confines of our own

academic and intellectual silos was primarily a function of the discipline’s

‘anarchophilia’. IR has had little influence, they argued, because our core concept has

had such little traction outside the neo-neo debates that have shaped so much of the

discipline, but little else.

2
 Yet despite this extensive debate, few have taken the time to interrogate the

concept’s plural meanings, to see what the consequences might be if anarchy itself

were defined differently (exceptions include Alker 1996, Prichard 2016). This paucity

of critical conceptual analysis is surely a function of how uncontested the meaning of

this concept has been, despite its centrality to the field (cf. Gallie 1955). Indeed, Jack

Donnelly has argued that we are probably best served by abandoning the concept

altogether (Donnelly 2015). With the exception of Lechner (this issue), Donnelly’s

position has yet to generate much response, which is itself quite telling.

But to accept Donnelly’s position would be to signal a rather anti-climactic

end to what was once a central debate in the field, and to cede the definition of

anarchy to the mainstream of the discipline too. This special issue puffs at the

glowing embers of this debate. Our aim is to take stock of, examine, and reconsider

the concept of anarchy, and its place in the study and practice of international

relations. We contest mainstream conceptualizations of anarchy by drawing upon

original research in political philosophy, medieval history, pluralist theory, history of

political thought, and of course, IR theory. The aim is to investigate how differing

conceptions of anarchy can advance the study of world politics. Our conclusion is that

there are a range of ways in which anarchy can be defined, deployed, and perhaps

even appropriated by IR theorists, and that ‘the anarchy problématique’ (Ashley 1988)

has plenty of life in it yet.

In this introductory essay we map out how anarchy has been used in 20 th

century IR, to make space for the important and original essays collected in this issue,

which we then survey. We explore some possible avenues for future research in the

conclusion.

3
Mapping Anarchy

Anarchy has become a toxic concept in IR theory, routinely associated with

conservative and retrograde politics. For the last one hundred years, from

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1916) to Jack Donnelly (2015), the absence of a

central authority in world politics has been viewed as pathological, and appeals to the

pressures of self-help in anarchy have been seen as an ideological skein to camouflage

the otherwise naked egoism of the powerful.

But there is little consensus on what anarchy is. As Jack Donnelly has pointed

out, ‘IR uses “anarchy” in multiple, shifting senses’, (Donnelly 2015: 394) and that it

is indeed ‘regularly and systematically used in shifting (and substantively biased)

senses.’ (Donnelly 2015: 413). Donnelly is also right that the ‘“naturalization” of

anarchy – its unthinking acceptance as an obvious and essential feature of

international relations’ (Donnelly 2015: 411) is hugely problematic. Likewise, there is

little agreement on whether anarchy necessitates self-help or balancing, whether it is a

transhirstorical fact of life amongst armed groups, or what precisely is meant by the

term itself. This ‘confusion at the conceptual core of the discipline’ has been ‘blithely

ignore[d]’ (Donnelly 2015: 411). Given this, and that anarchy is a very recent, and

now redundant addition to the discipline’s lexicon, and we would be better off using

the more generic term ‘disorder’ (Donnelly 2015: 20).

To abandon anarchy for disorder would be to close this debate down

somewhat prematurely. To see only confusion and bias would also be to overlook the

substantive consensus that underpins much theorisation of anarchy in IR, and

foreclose on the attempt to re-theorise it. The discipline’s use of the term anarchy

remains wedded primarily to the social contract tradition of the 17 th and 18th century,

and mid-20th century micro-economic theories of the marketplace (Prichard 2016). On

4
the first account, anarchy is an apriori, pre-social condition of lawlessness from which

political community evolves. On the latter, anarchy is the product of a set of

assumptions about the utility maximising proclivities of individuals in a condition of

material scarcity. In both, it is pathological but productive because of this.

This dual framing is deeply problematic for two reasons. First, the social

contract tradition is not a description of the world, but a moral argument for how it

ought to be institutionalised (Jahn 2000). Likewise, homo economicus is an

assumption at the heart of modelling behaviours, not a description of the world itself.

Furthermore, the latter is designed to overcome the normative implications of the

former through appeals to science and objectivity, but in so doing, micro-economic

modelling compounds this problem. Identifying anarchy with the lawless pursuit of

rational self-interest, and modelling social interactions therein, relies on a parochial

western artefact of the state of nature, the underpinning of the very social contract

tradition that this nominally positivist social theory disavows.

When we examine the ways in which this simple summary works out in the

writings of specific individuals, we see that most are using the word to refer to

different types of things entirely. Hedley Bull (1977) understood the international

anarchy to be a deeply social construct, replete with enduring legal and political

norms that structured state interaction. Following H.L.A. Hart, for Bull the presence

or absence of a state was not central to understanding the function of rules and norms,

hence the persistence of the imperial commonwealth. Rather the prior rules and norms

themselves are what help us understand the social form in which we find them.

Taking this starting point, Bull rejected the ‘domestic analogy’ which framed the

solution to the problems of global order in terms of the resolution of the state of

5
nature by a powerful central power, even if he accepted the necessity of sovereignty

in relation to particular communities.

Following Burke and finding value in the anarchical society stands in stark

contrast to the Rousseauean tradition in IR, that is, scholars who like Rousseau saw

the establishment of the republican state as the compromised fulfilment of our

political natures. This move from anarchy of the Old Regime to law, or from slavery

to freedom, as the primary normative transformation of modernity, but it remains

unfulfilled for as long as the displaced anarchy ‘out there’ threatens the normative

order within. We see corresponding accounts in liberal institutionalism (Ikenberry

2009), or thicker cosmopolitan post-statism (Held 1995), or Marxist accounts of

parochial nature of capitalist modernity (Rosenberg 1994): anarchy between states

was the lawless domain of egoism and self-interest, and progress was defined by how

far we move from it in philosophical-historical time.

For Jim George (1995), the egoism/anarchy thematic so common to critical

and conservative framings of the field, was a discursive trope constitutive of

modernity. Writers who followed this line of thinking dismissed the idea that anarchy

referred to anything tangibly ‘out there’ at all. For R.B.J. Walker, our disciplinary

constructions of anarchy were themselves more compelling objects of study, precisely

for what they can tell us about our modern condition (Walker 1993). Anarchy is an

inescapably normative concept, one which implies much about what we think we

understand about politics. It is not a thing that can be studied objectively because it is

itself, as a central concept, part of the discursive framing for who we are as modern

subjects. Evoking anarchy is a uniquely particular, even parochial way of representing

political life.

6
 Even historical accounts of the emergence of the state show how we routinely

replicate this mistake of universalising the parochialism of modernity. The ‘myth of

1648’ (Teschke 2003), is that sovereign states emerged out of the treaties of

Westphalia, or that modernity was a quintessentially European invention (de Carvahlo

Leira and Hobson 2011). But the implication of a medieval or non-European state of

nature transcended by the modern nation state looms large in our understanding of

philosophical time.

While IR’s understanding of international anarchy has not gained much

traction outside the field, anarchy and its synonyms is used more frequently to

conceptualize social processes in decidedly non-pejorative ways. Usually, however,

synonyms like self-organisation, self-management, horizontalism, and others are used.

In cybernetic theory and management studies (Wachhaus 2012, Swann and Stoborod

2014), speculative realism (Bryant 2013, Harman 2013), political theory (Rancière

2006), neo-pluralist theory (Hirst 1997), economics (Ostrom 1990, Leeson 2014),

chaos and complexity theory (Chesters and Welsh 2005), and elsewhere, theorising

order without an orderer is increasingly common. These literatures, some of which are

discussed in the articles that follow, have yet to be fully explored by IR scholars

wishing to expand their conceptual horizons.

One of the exceptions is Keohane and Ostrom’s (1995) joint project, which

sought to asses what could be learnt from the distinctions between self-organising

systems at community and international level of social life, assessing how collective

action problems (free riding and so on) can be overcome without a central organising

institution. Keohane and Ostrom replicate the standard IR distinction between internal

and external dynamics, and the levels of analysis problem, assuming there to be

qualitatively distinct dynamics at play in the upper echelons and in non-state societies,

7
for example much of Nepal (Keohane and Ostrom 1995: 11). Problematic as these

prior assumptions are, their conclusions are that neither the scale of the horizontal

relationships, nor the heterogeneity of the actors necessarily precludes order emerging

between them, indeed radical plurality may facilitate emergent modes of cooperation

that precludes the necessity of formal state-like institutions (Keohane and Ostrom

1995: 23).

Much more work is needed to expand the conceptual and political repertoire of

work like this, and our hope is that the papers that follow facilitate this. IN order to do

this, we probably ought to stop viewing anarchy in terms of the state of nature,

something from which modern politics will deliver us, and start to understand it as an

empirical feature of world politics. To do this, we will need to rethink the normative

baggage associated with the concept. While it is widely accepted in IR that, for better

or worse, international anarchy is highly ordered and remarkably stable in spite of the

absence of a central command structure, anarchy does not preclude cooperation, law,

ethics and so on either. That this is an anomaly for IR at all is somewhat surprising

from the perspective of the history of ideas. As Heyward Alker pointed out, anarchists

have been making this argument for nearly two centuries (Alker 1996: 362, 371), and

that none have ventured here is an indication of the sedimentation of a narrow set of

shared ideas of what anarchy might be.

Contemporary anarchist political philosophy has re-emerged in a range of

disciplines, in organization studies (Wachhaus 2012), to law (Halling 2009, Chartier

2012, Allain 2014), and political economy (Wigger 2016, Wigger and Buch-Hansen

2013). In political theory, post-Marxists like Jacques Rancière (2006) are deploying

the concept to understand the ontological equality between political subjects, and the

technocratic institutions that undermine that. The anthropologists David Graeber

8
(2004, 2011) and James C. Scott (2009, 2012), pioneers in anarchist methods and

insights, are both making inroads into International Relations and Political Science

(Krasner 2011). And then of course, there’s the work of Noam Chomsky, who has

been conducting foreign policy analysis with an anarchist intent since he was a young

teen dissecting the partisan politics of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War

(Osborn 2009, Herring and Robinson 2003). In short, there has been an explosion of

interest in anarchism, too broad to summarize here (for a good bibliographic resource,

see Kinna 2012), but which runs deeper in left wing social movements than it does in

the academy.

Linking this set of writings with IR’s conception of anarchy is a difficult work

in progress. Notable is a forum on ‘Anarchism and World Politics’ in Millennium in

2010, and important contributions subsequently by Cudworth and Hobden (2011),

Newman (2012) Kazmi (2012) and Prichard (2013). But the earliest invocations of the

anarchist approach to IR include some of the best known names in the field: Thomas

Weiss (1975), Richard Falk (1978, 2010), and Ken Booth (1991) have all set out the

merits of the political philosophy of anarchism for thinking about world order, though

both Weiss and Booth have subsequently become advocates of a world state,

abandoning their youthful enthusiasm.

Part of the reason for the enduring pull of statism in IR is surely the legacy of

the ‘Hobbesian’ world-view, that global insecurity demands some form of centralised

power (cf. Christov, this issue). The empirical basis for the argument that Hobbes held

this view, or that it is historically or contemporaneously self evident that such an

order needs to exist, is widely rejected, not only by those surveyed thus far, but also

increasingly by realists. Writing about James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being

Governed: An anarchist history of upland South East Asia, Steven Krasner stated the

9
following: ‘The Art of Not Being Governed changed how I have thought about

[this…] and much else in political life, something that I can say about only very few

books that I have read. James C. Scott is the un-Hobbes.’ (Krasner 2011: 79) What

Krasner takes from Scott is that, ‘The whole idea of the social contract is based upon

the false premise that there was an incentive to move from statelessness to the state

[…] Life was nasty and brutish, and probably shorter, within the state than outside it.

Hobbes was wrong.’ (ibid, 82). Yet Krasner remains convinced that the brightest

future for human life remains within states rather than without them, harking back to

Tocqueville and Locke for support. This is quite telling.

In short, then, the problem of anarchy cannot be divorced from how we

understand the problem of epistemology, ontology, politics and conceptions of the

good. The relative merits of internal hierarchy and external anarchy rest on definitions

of both, but also how these relate to these four features of political analysis. Likewise,

IR scholars have been too quick to isolate the international as the sui generis domain

of anarchy. Finally, and related to this, plural anarchical societies are remarkably well

ordered, and cooperation in anarchy persists across plural scales, in spite of the

heterogeneity of actors, and competing visions of the good. Contributions to this

special issue push at these three broad themes: anarchy/hierarchy; anarchy as

structure; anarchy and plurality. The contributors are not all anarchists. In fact there is

a good degree of plurality of views articulated here. However each contributor finds

specific articulations of anarchy to be unsatisfactory in important ways.

Insights from the special issue

10
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this three part distinction between anarchy/hierarchy, anarchy

as structure, and the problem of plurality corresponds with Waltz’s well-known

formulation (Waltz 1979). First, Waltz produced a conceptual binary of anarchy

outside, and hierarchy within states, that has shaped much scholarly debate in IR

theory. Second, his insistence that anarchy is a structure that shapes the behaviour of

states and determines how they act and interact was also a key feature of his theory of

order in world politics. Third, Waltz’s insisted that because of the nature of anarchy as

a self-help system, all of the units are compelled to become and act in the same way:

the emergence of states is inevitable and so is the security dilemma. The latter is the

unique domain of the professional study of IR. This question of functional plurality is

subsumed within the prior two elements. We have to assume that the only units of

analytical virtue for the study of world politics are states, such that the

anarchy/hierarchy and anarchy-as-structure sets of logics gain their meaning. But in

exploring the question of plurality afresh, as most contributors do in different ways,

the problems of inside/outside and political structure are radically problematized to.

Contesting the Hierarchy/Anarchy Binary

Since Waltz hierarchy and anarchy have been treated in a binary relationship. In

Theory of International Relations Waltz argues that every type of political order can

be considered as either a hierarchy or anarchy (Waltz 1979: chapter 6). This binary

categorization of political orders was then linked with sovereignty to argue that

domestic political orders are hierarchical whereas the international political order is

anarchic. Since formulating international relations in this way, the binary

inside/outside hierarchy/anarchy understanding of international relations has been

criticized on multiple fronts. Early post-structural theorists, drawing upon Deleuze

11
and other currents of French theory, critiqued the reductive ontological assumptions

that informed Waltz’s binary (Ashley 1988, Walker 1993, Havercroft 2011). More

recent scholarship has sought to reject Waltzian anarchy by insisting that the

international system is fundamentally hierarchical (Zarakol and Mattern 2016). While

engaging with both of these literatures some of the contributors to this volume

propose to rethink the anarchy/hierarchy binary to propose alternative ways of

thinking about the international system.

Peter Halden’s ‘Heteronymous politics beyond anarchy and hierarchy: The

multiplication of forms of rule 900-1300’, argues that hierarchy/anarchy cannot

describe nor explain political life for most of Western history. IR scholars have

interpreted medieval politics alternatively as taking place in an ‘anarchy’ or as being

characterized by a hierarchy with the Emperor and the Pope at the apex. Haldén

argues that neither concept describes the structure of European politics well. Rather,

given the sheer plurality of forms of rule at this time, and the persistence of many

different principles of differentiation that existed simultaneously, anarchy was

structured into the medieval system. The situation was closer to anarchy as

understood as the absence of overarching principles of order, rather than as ‘anarchy’

in the IR sense of absence of ruler. Yet, by studying a long period, c.700-c.1300,

Haldén demonstrates that Europe became more heteronymous as time went by, not

less, challenging the thesis that the emergence of sates was inevitable.

In a more contemporary vein, Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson

critically engage with Mattern and Zarakol (2016) on international hierarchy in order

to rethink securitization discourse as a form of micro-fascism. They investigate the

role of ‘anarchy’ in state securitization, in order to discuss the struggle to impose

hierarchy as a productive political structure (Mattern and Zarakol’s 2016: 623). By

12
explaining state hierarchies’ struggle with active and reactive anarchic networks, they

theorize a state in existential crisis, which exploits anti-anarchist discourses to

respond to network threats. They then explore how the use of fear of anarchy is

productive of structures of securitization. As an ‘antiproduction assemblage’, the state

treats logics stemming from the ‘social principle’ as a repressed Real, the exclusion of

which underpins its own functioning.  The securitization discourse of ‘new threats’ is

a statist response to the uncertainty and fear brought on by the proliferation of

opposing network forms of organization, a new form of pluralisation against which

the state routinely reacts. This response is a statist form of terror attempting to fix

network flows in place. The scarcity and fear resulting from state terror ensures

responses to this structural violence by reactive networks, whilst paradoxically also

exacerbating reactive tendencies within social movements, creating a spiral of terror,

and the very situation of global civil war which Hobbesian/Realist IR theory - reliant

on the schema of states struggling for power in an anarchic international system -

attempts to ward off. 

What Haldén and Karatzogianni and Robinson show us, then, is that political

language is constitutive and causal, shaping contemporary political practices through

reference to a mythic past or the spectre of a Hobbesian present. A third contributor to

this volume problematizes this tendency of IR scholars to invoke Hobbes as the

founding theorist of international anarchy. Theo Christov, in his article ‘The Invention

of Hobbesian Anarchy’ argues that the divide between the disciplines of political

theory and international relations has produced a false image of how Hobbes

conceived international anarchy. Most IR scholars take Hobbes’ famous description

of the state of war in Leviathan as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes

1996: 89) as analogous to Waltzian accounts of the international system. Christov

13
challenges this linking of Hobbes to contemporary accounts of international anarchy

on two grounds. First, he argues that the discourse of international anarchy that

equates Hobbes’ state of nature with the international realm is a result of scholarship

since the early 20th century, rather than a claim that Hobbes made himself (cf.

Havercroft 2012). Second, Christov reconstructs Hobbes’ account of international

politics to argue that Hobbes actually admonished the militarism of states, and argued

that because states were not analogous to individuals, relations between states would

not be as violent and disorderly as relations between individuals in a state of nature.

What this means is that Hobbes is a surprising theoretical source for theorizing a form

of international anarchy in which warfare is not structurally pre-determined, and for

theorizing ways of escaping the anarchy problematique without resorting to a global

leviathan, themes picked up by anarchists, ironically enough.

All three of these pieces propose alternative ways of conceiving the

international realm that are neither strictly hierarchy nor anarchy. Christov offers the

provocative claim that the theorist of anarchy par excellence – Thomas Hobbes –

actually argued that relations between states where fundamentally different from

Hobbes’s hypothetical war of all against all that exists in the state of nature.

Karatzogianni and Robinson also reject the image of Waltzain anarchy, and instead

argue that a turn the Deluezian concept of the assemblage offers a more productive

way of thinking about state formation and behaviour in the era of new threats such as

cyberwarfare and transnational terrorist movements. Finally Haldén, through his

reading of medieval European politics proposes heteronomy as a third way of

conceptualizing the international system of this era. All three papers, through their

agonistic readings Waltzian anarchy offer productive alternative ways of conceiving

the international that are neither anarchy nor hierarchy, but which take plurality as

14
primary. Future scholars can draw upon these concepts to enrich their analyses of the

international.

Anarchy as structure

Waltz felt that his major contribution in Theory of International Relations was to shift

the analysis of international politics away from a focus on the behaviour of states

towards a structural theory of the international system. For Waltz, ‘[t]he structure of a

system acts as a constraining and disposing force, and because it does so systems

theories explain and predict continuity within a system’ (Waltz 1986: 57). For Waltz

the structure of the international system is anarchy, which he defines as ‘relations of

coordination among a systems units, and that implies their sameness’ (Waltz 1986:

87). While Waltz proceeds to argue that the structure of anarchy compels states to

pursue a self-help strategy, three contributors to this volume propose to rethink what

anarchy as structure entails.

First, Lucian Ashworth finds an alternative understanding of anarchy in a

surprising location: the theoretical writings of David Mitrany, a key intellectual

architect of the post-war European order. Although David Mitrany’s international

thought is not usually associated with the concept of the international anarchy,

Ashworth argues that Mitrany’s analysis actually compares two forms of anarchical

order. The first form is the order associated with the relations between states, while

the second is his functional alternative to this order. The functional approach,

comprising the constitutive functional plurality of politics, is anarchical in the sense

that it remains an order without an orderer. In first analysing the dynamics and

failings of the inter-state order, and then suggesting pragmatic process-orientated

15
solutions to those failings, Ashworth argue that Mitrany follows a similar approach to

his classical realist contemporaries. Again, here the functional plurality of world order

generates similar yet contrasting insights about the possibility of an equation between

anarchy and an alternative politics.

In her article ‘The Invisible Structures of Anarchy: Gender, Orders, and

Global Politics’, Laura Sjoberg critiques Waltz’s theory of anarchy for its blindness to

its own invisible structures. Because of our tendency to follow this narrow reading,

Sjoberg argues that anarchy is undertheorized in IR, and that that the

undertheorization of the concept of anarchy in IR is rooted in the idea that the lack of

exogenous authority is not just a feature of the international political system, but the

salient feature. Sjoberg recognizes that the international system is anarchical but looks

to theorize its contours – to see the invisible structures that are overlaid within

international anarchy, and then to consider what those structures mean for theorizing

anarchy itself. She uses, as an example, the plural (invisible) ways that gender orders

global political relations, to suggest that anarchy in the international arena is a place

of multiple anarchic orders rather than of disorder, including the way gender orders

global politics in various ways.

Silviya Lechner, in her article ‘Why anarchy still matters for International

Relations: On theories and things’ critiques recent anarchy rejectionists, such as Jack

Donnelly (2015), by exploring how anarchy is theorized in the structuralist accounts

of Waltz and Bull. She contends that Donnelly’s critique of anarchy targets not just

concepts of anarchy but theories of anarchy and thereby expresses an anti-theory

ethos tacitly accepted in the discipline. As a form of conceptual atomism, this ethos is

hostile to structuralist and normative theories. Lechner calls for reinstating theoretical

16
holism against conceptual atomism and defending the enduring relevance of theories

of international anarchy for IR.

She does this by revisiting two classic structuralist accounts of international

anarchy articulated in Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (scientific

structuralism) and Hedley Bull’s Anarchical Society (normative structuralism). Both

represent coherent theoretical ‘wholes’, which reveal a more complex relationship

between anarchy and hierarchy than supposed by critics, and which recognise the

important connection between the structure of international anarchy (whose key

players are states) and the possibility of collective freedom, an aspect Donnelly’s

account cannot see.

The crucial difference between the three scholars in this section and the

scholars in section one, is that Ashworth, Sjoberg, and Lechner all want to keep the

Waltzian anarchy problematique central to IR analysis, but modify it slightly. So in

the case of Ashworth, we find an interesting reading of Mitrany that presents

functionalism as an anarchistic resolution to the anarchy problematique. Sjoberg also

retains the centrality of anarchy, but argues that by including a gendered analysis of

Waltzian anarchy, scholars can see the ways in which an international system is

deeply ordered along patriarchal lines. Finally, Lechner wants to preserve Waltzian

anarchy for normative reasons. Namely that an international system structured on

anarchy actually preserves freedom in the international system, especially during an

era when transnational processes and institutions increasingly try to govern state

behaviour without the consent of the citizenry of those states. What these three papers

offer, then, is an invitation to revisit some of the hidden virtues of Waltzian anarchy,

that many more critically oriented IR scholars have been too quick to dismiss in the

years since Theory of International Politics was published.

17
Pluralist Anarchy

While the first two thematics in this special issue grapple with conventional accounts

of anarchy within International Relations scholarship, and deal with plurality only

tangentially, the final two pieces make the explicit case for rethinking anarchy on

pluralist terms. A crucial feature of Waltzian anarchy is the way ‘sameness’ of the

units in the structure is coordinated on the basis of self-organisation (Waltz 1986: 87).

The final two pieces in this issue consider what happens to anarchy when we keep the

idea of an order without and orderer, but acknowledge that more than one kind of unit

can be part of this system, and ask what this pluralism implies for ordering.

In ‘Bringing groups back in: Collective intentionality, complex pluralism and

the problem of anarchy’ Alex Prichard argues that in order to rethink order on

pluralist lines in world politics, we must first abandon the tendency to personify the

state. By developing and applying a realist theory of collective intentionality to all

social groups, a picture of social pluralism emerges that poses problems for our

standard theory of anarchy. For Waltz anarchy is an analytical category, rather than a

reflection of reality per se, which he contrasts with hierarchy. In positing the

ontological reality of the constitutive plurality of social life, and political orders

contingent ‘constellations’, anarchy can be understood as ontologically, conceptually

and analytically prior to all social order. what of all the other collectively intentional

groups in modern political life? Lost in this debates is the constitutive role of all

social groups in any political ontology. This pluralisation also has significant effects

on our ability to posit an isolated international domain, but it creates room for

thinking about anarchy as central to politics as such.

18
 In a similar vein, Cerny and Prichard use advances in globalization theory to

articulate the contours of a ‘new anarchy’ in world politics. Turning to the plural and

intersecting processes that structure and dissolve the global economy, Cerny and

Prichard show how modern IR theory has consistently underestimated the depth of the

problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring

this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks

and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border

wars, and internally disaggregated and transnationally connected state actors, leads to

a complex and multidimensional restructuring of the global, the local, and the uneven

connections in between. If we accept that states are becoming disaggregated and

hollowed out, and that multiple group actors are emerging in importance in global

politics, the global order is becoming radically more anarchic, understood as both

disordered and lacking fewer legitimate and final points of authority. As Keohane and

Ostrom have argued (above), there is no prima facie reason to assume the latter.

These last two papers represent a third path forward. Rather than developing

alternative conceptions to anarchy (section 1) or recovering the hidden virtues of

anarchy (section 2), Prichard and Cerny and Prichard examine what happens when we

include different types of units in the international system, but accept the Waltzian

premise that the system is self-organizing. The result from this third approach is an

invitation to re-imagine international anarchy as plurality rather than disorder. In this

perspective, Waltz’s understanding of international anarchy as a self-help system,

gives way to a more democratic conceptualization of an ordered international system

that lacks a central orderer. This conceptualization, then, creates a space for anarchist,

pluralist, and republican understandings of the international system as self-organized

19
and collaborative, rather than the classical realist formulation as disorganized and

inherently hostile.

Conclusion

As our review of the conceptualization of anarchy in much IR theory has shown,

scholars have in the main used two strategies to handle anarchy. They have accepted

the Waltzian conception of anarchy as a self-help system, or they have altogether

rejected the salience of anarchy for thinking through the nature of global politics. The

curious consequence of these two mutually reinforcing strategies is that the nature of

anarchy ends up being un-theorized. Our goal in this issue is focus on the question of

what anarchy is and might be, so as to open up a broader conversation about the

international system, or world politics, that takes the idea of an order without an

orderer seriously, and without rehearsing the realist assumption that such a conception

of anarchy necessarily leads to an inevitably tragic conception of international

politics.

The contributors to this volume help us see anarchy differently, and thereby

draw our attention to alternative conceptions of self-order – be it Deleuzian

assemblages or medieval heteronomy. They draw our attention to alternative readings

of anarchy in significant international political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and

David Mitrany. They draw our attention to the gendered and normative dimensions of

anarchy. And they propose ways in which we can reimagine international anarchy as

international pluralism. While there are significant tensions between the different

approaches to anarchy undertaken in this issue, the one thing they all do is take

20
anarchy seriously, and in so doing, provide international relations scholars numerous

avenues for investigating one of its foundational concepts.

We began this introduction by asking what anarchy is. While this volume does

not offer a single uncontested definition of anarchy, by placing the analysis of anarchy

at its centre we believe that two important avenues for future research have been

opened up. The first is that the definition of anarchy is actually a surprisingly under

theorized realm for international relations. This is surprising since so much

scholarship takes anarchy as its starting point, and so much scholarship uses Waltz

and his formulation of anarchy as its foil. But by focusing so narrowly on Waltzian

anarchy, the discipline has lost sight of numerous other ways of thinking about self-

organizing systems that do not begin or end with the same set of assumptions. Much

more work could be done to explore how self-organising orders work, how they

replicate, how they might be mimicked or hybridised, and how they might be

deployed to respond to problems of planetary scale and plural conceptions of the

good.

Second, by drawing upon alternative traditions of thinking about anarchy from

outside of the narrow IR canon, we can see alternative ways of conceptualizing self-

organizing systems that can offer new insights in light of current global crises over

such diverse problems as transnational terrorism, global financial crises, the

untangling of the post-World War II (or at least post-Cold War) American order, and

ecological collapse. With processes of global centralisation and homogenisation

pulling against pluralising and fragmenting tendencies, more needs to be done to

theorise and evaluate the relative merits of different modes of governance,

government and more anarchistic varieties of self-rule.

21
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