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"Heterarchy in World Politics challenges the fundamental framing of international relations and world politics. IR theory has always been dominated by the presumption that world politics is, at its core, a system of states. However, this has always been problematic, challengeable, time-bound, and increasingly anachronistic. In the 21st century, world politics is becoming increasingly multi-nodal and characterized by "heterarchy" - the coexistence and conflict between differently structured micro- and meso quasi-hierarchies that compete and overlap not only across borders but also across economic-financial sectors and social groupings. Thinking about international order in terms of heterarchy is a paradigm shift away from the mainstream "competing paradigms" of realism, liberalism, and constructivism. This book explores how, since the mid-20th century, the dialectic of globalization and fragmentation has caught states and the interstate system in the complex evolutionary process toward heterarchy. These heterarchical institutions and processes are characterized by increasing autonomy and special interest capture. The process of heterarchy empowers strategically situated agents - especially agents with substantial autonomous resources, and in particular economic resources - in multi-nodal competing institutions with overlapping jurisdictions. The result is the decreasing capacity of macro-states to control both domestic and transnational political/economic processes. In this book, the authors demonstrate that this is not a simple breakdown of states and the states system; it is in fact the early stages of a structural evolution of world politics. This book will interest students, scholars and researchers of international relations theory. It will also have significant appeal in the fields of world politics, security studies, war studies, peace studies, global governance studies, political science, political economy, political power studies, and the social sciences more generally"--

Abstract
World Politics is undergoing a range of crucial structural changes in the 21st century. The relationship between the states system that evolved since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and became predominant in the 19th and 20th centuries is being increasingly challenged in a number of complex ways. The core problématique, as addressed in different ways in these books, is whether states are still predominant hierarchical structures in an anarchical world system – "nodes" or building blocks – as argued in particular by realist and neo-realist theorists exemplified by Kenneth Waltz, or whether they are increasingly criss-crossed and undercut by what are sometimes called "heterarchical" structure and processes. These include macro-, meso-, and mini-hierarchies that are turning states from "proactive" institutions and processes to "reactive" or even or even "residual" ones. The core of these analyses is whether and how states are still the main independent variables in what has been called International Relations or whether and how far they are increasingly dependent variables in a changing World Politics. These books all make interesting and useful contributions to this question.