Lateral Relations in World Politics: Rethinking Interactions and Change among Fields, Systems, and Sectors

Abstract

Scholarship drawing from a wide array of perspectives including field theoretical and functional differentiation approaches has shed increasing light on the sectoral dimensions of world politics. In contrast to dominant approaches emphasizing hierarchy and power in relations between global fields, this article offers a novel interpretive framework for understanding how diverse fields, systems, or sectors may interact and facilitate change in world politics beyond the operation of established hierarchies and power dynamics. Taking forward the previously underutilized concept of symbolically generalized media of communication, this article elucidates two processes of international political change by which different fields, systems, or sectors may transform world politics. The first process, lateral retreat, is illustrated with reference to the case study of the Protestant Reformation, in which internal changes in the religious field facilitated the development of an increasingly autonomous political domain. The second process, lateral penetration, is illustrated with reference to the international political response to the climate change and Covid-19 crises, in which the scientific sector contributed toward transformed political priorities and associated hierarchies, at least in the short term. These diverse cases are used to indicate the broad potential scope of application of the concept of symbolically generalized media of communication to enrich relational theorizing in the study of international relations, and to improve understanding of diverse dynamics of international political change missed in traditional power- (and anarchy-) centric accounts.

How diplomacy evolves: the global spread of honorific state awards

“…For further research venues, this paper suggests the overall usefulness not only of evolutionary theory but also of MST for understanding the structural conditions behind seemingly trivial phenomena of world politics (Albert et al, 2008;Peña and Davies, 2022;Youssef, 2020). In much of IR theory, the actual workings of diplomacy remain invisibilized as the liminal between a political will (which is prior to diplomacy) and an international outcome (which comers after diplomacy).…”

Peace needs constant reproduction: The temporality of the diplomatic system

“…While such insights into the simultaneity of peace and war are not necessarily new (Kessler, 2012; Peña and Davies, 2022; Stetter, 2014), it follows from this observation that the negation of peace is not war, but rather un-peace. Like every medium of communication, peace can undergo a binary coding (Luhmann, 2012: 215–227) so as to exhibit a positive and a negative side, with the positive side denoting a communicatively accepted peace (which ensures a smooth continuation of the diplomatic system reproducing further peace events), and the negative side denoting a communicatively rejected un-peace (which sparks reflexive consequences such as normative legal claims or a system-wide learning).…”