Beyond State and Hegemony: International Orders as Anarchic Meta-Fields

Abstract

AbstractThis paper extends a Bourdieusian practice-based approach to a novel understanding of international orders as “Anarchic Meta-Fields” (AMFs). It first explores the metatheoretical advantages inherent in Field Theory's expansion toward questions of order, considering the position of Bourdieu at the intersection of Weberian, Durkheimian, and Marxist social theory. It then increases the analytical breadth of preceding “imperial” and “hegemonic” applications of Bourdieu's framework through two disaggregations—of order and realist notions of hegemony, and realist and neo-Gramscian forms of the same. In a first, Hobbesian turn, the international social space is subsequently conceptualized as an “AMF” created by outward rather than inward projections of power and practice by state nobilities; variations within this global AMF are identified as “subfields”. The openness of Bourdieu's framework is then argued to allow for the widest range of international orders based on specific configurations of multidimensionally defined capital, and varying forms of doxic practice. The framework is illustrated through an application to the Cold War order as a composite social space, consisting of the global AMF itself, and four distinct, yet heteronomous subfields. The paper concludes with a proposed conceptual and empirical research agenda.