Defending Hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic Capital and Political Dominance in Early Modern China and the Cold War

Abstract

Why do leading actors invest in costly projects that they expect will not yield appreciable military or economic benefits? We identify a causal process in which concerns about legitimacy produce attempts to secure dominance in arenas of high symbolic value by investing wealth and labor into unproductive (in direct military and economic terms) goods and performances. We provide evidence for our claims through a comparative study of the American Project Apollo and the Ming Dynasty's treasure fleets. We locate our argument within a broader constructivist and practice-theoretic understanding of hierarchy and hegemony. We build on claims that world politics is a sphere of complex social stratification by viewing constituent hierarchies in terms of social fields. Our specific theory and broader framework, we contend, provide tools for understanding the workings of power politics beyond military and economic competition.

The Missing Links: Choosing and Rejecting International Issue Linkages in the Presidential Interest

“…Replicating that level of precision in many applied investigations is likely to be difficult. However, even a folk version of process tracing forces researchers to make their assumptions and interpretive choices transparent (Musgrave and Nexon ). It also lays down markers by which other researchers can systematically evaluate and challenge the original investigator's conclusions.…”

WIN-WIN! with ODA-man: legitimizing development assistance policy in Japan

“…The emphasis on power politics indeed means a scientific commitment to see politics, both international and domestic, as the domain for human contests and agency (Goddard & Nexon, 2016). 2 This merging of the domestic and international extends itself to IR's 'rhetorical turn' literature where the focus of a number of seemingly domestically-oriented pieces (Krebs, 2015;Krebs & Jackson, 2007;Nexon & Musgrave, 2018) is ultimately to understand international politics.…”

Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of Hegemonic Orders

“…62 Hegemony is also distinct from hierarchy qua hierarchy, which refers, as we have seen, to any kind of vertical stratification. 63 Most hegemonic-order theories, then, explore conditions in which a political community uses "its superior economic and military capabilities-its position atop interstate hierarchies in these domains-to create international order," 64 which is "manifest in the settled rules and arrangements between states that define and guide their interactions." 65 From this perspective, it follows that a great deal of the subject matter of the new hierarchy studies, then, analyzes the hierarchical characteristics of international orders-hegemonic or otherwise.…”