Common-Pool Hierarchy: Explaining the Emergence of Cooperative Hierarchies

Abstract

Hierarchy in international relations has often been understood as an arrangement with a single dominant state controlling aspects of the subordinate actor's sovereignty. While such arrangements play an important role in structuring international politics, it does not exhaust the forms that hierarchy can take. Very often hierarchies have developed where multiple states jointly claim control of the same sovereign rights of the subordinate state. This paper introduces a new conceptualization of hierarchy where the sovereign rights of the subordinate state are understood as a resource that can be controlled by multiple dominant states. As with other resources, different types of property regimes can be developed to organize access and extraction of sovereignty, such as common property resources regimes. Finally, an explanation of common-pool hierarchy regimes is developed and explored using two case studies: European imperialism in the nineteenth-century China and the scramble for Africa.