Person:

Beckfield, Jason

A growing body of research demonstrates powerful effects of international organizations on national policy, and the literature on international conflict is increasingly adopting a network perspective on international organizations, but we still know little about the network structure of the world polity itself. This is surprising in light of the theoretical implications of world polity theory, world systems theory, and the world civilizations approach to the structure of the world polity. Using data on a set of prominent intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), along with a comparison to the complete population of IGOs, this study examines the world polity as a network structured by symbolic and material conflict. Network analysis reveals a contradictory duality in the structure of the world polity: while states are densely interconnected through international organizations, these international organizations are only sparsely interconnected. Contrary to world polity theory, world system position and world civilization predict position in the world polity. These results show that, in neglecting the network structure of the world polity, previous research has underestimated the extent of structural inequality in the world polity. Because embeddedness in the world polity has such powerful effects on state policies, international trade, and international conflict, the centralization and fragmentation of the world polity may have disintegrative implications for world politics.

Globalization has renewed interest in the place and role of cities in the international system. Recent literature proposes that the fate of cities (and their residents) has become increasingly tied to their position in international flows of investment and trade. Data on the branch locations of the world’s 500 largest multinational enterprises in 2000 are subjected to two broad types of network analytic techniques in order to analyze the “world city system.” First, 3,692 cities are analyzed in terms of three measures of point centrality. Second, blockmodeling techniques are employed to generalize further about the positions and roles played by cities in the system. These techniques are used to trace out the structure of the world city system, locate cities in the context of a global urban hierarchy, and explore the degree to which this diverges from a simple one‐to‐one matching of cities onto nation‐states in the world system.