Introduction: Balance and Hierarchy in International Systems

Abstract

The balance of power is one of the most influential ideas in international relations (IR). No theoretical concept has been the subject of as much scholarly inquiry and none is more likely to fall from the lips of foreign policy analysts and practitioners. This continued fascination with the balance of power is understandable, for it appears as central to scholarly debates about the basic properties of international systems as it is to policy debates over responses to US primacy in the early 21^st century. Yet it has never been systemically and comprehensively examined in premodern or non-European contexts — and therefore it has never been considered in the context of previous cases of unipolarity. Balance-of-power theory and policy analysis thus rest on profoundly unbalanced empirical foundations. Almost everything we think we know about the balance of power is the product of modern European history and the global experience of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries.