Abstract
Practices of comparison underpin many ordering practices in world politics. As IR usually analyses these practices separately, it lacks an overarching framework that accounts for and allows studying the variegated ways in which comparisons con-tribute to the (re)making of international orders. We aim to develop such a framework by conceptualising international orders as products of the ongoing enactment of a nested fabric of multiple ordering practices. We argue that the salience and effects of particular comparisons depend, firstly, on the constellation of actors that produce and circulate comparative knowledge in a given domain of world politics and, secondly, on the salience of the ordering practices to which the comparisons are linked within the nested fabric of ordering practices. After outlining possible research strategies for studying the co-evolution of practices of comparison and international orders, we illustrate our framework with a case study of the ways in which power comparisons have informed ordering practices such as club governance and balance of power politics.
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Notes
International orders were not always organised around (nation-)states as primary actors. Historically, dynasties and empires were prominent forms of organising political authority. Following established custom in IR, we nevertheless stick to the term ‘international’ orders to denote macro-scale social orders among polities.
Following Schatzki (2012: 14), we understand practices as ‘open-ended, spatially-temporally dispersed nexus of doings and sayings’.
We bracket the complex question of how much harmonisation is necessary for ordering practices to be effective. A perfect synchronisation of all comparisons is obviously not necessary. The evaluations of credit rating agencies are similar but not fully congruent. Too much incongruence, however, can have destabilising effects. For example, for balance of power politics to work as a social institution, the evaluations of the relevant powers have to be fairly congruent (Wohlforth 1993: 8‒9).
This is not to say that no one publishes power rankings. The Correlates of War Project (2021) notably compiles the ‘Composite Indicator of National Capability’ (CINC). However, we are interested in whose comparisons inform the ordering practices. While widely used by IR scholars, the CINC has so far not formed the basis for the distribution of special rights in IOs or for arms control treaties.
For an overview of publishers of statistics on armaments and the arms trade, see Lincove (2018).
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at a workshop in Toronto in March 2019. We are grateful to all participants for their constructive comments. We also thank Katja Freistein, Martin Koch and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback. This article emerged in the context of the Collaborative Research Centre 1288 ‘Practices of Comparing’ at Bielefeld University funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
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Müller, T., Albert, M. & Langer, K. Practices of comparison and the making of international orders. J Int Relat Dev 25, 834–859 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00266-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00266-y