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Abstract :
[en] The complexity of power structures shapes contemporary world politics as heterarchy (Cerny and Belmonte, 2021). Heterarchy is the system of differentiated, uneven arrangements that structure world politics beyond the binary logics of anarchy and hierarchy (Cerny, 2023). These structures cut across the state system and the binary categories of the inside and outside, the foreign and the domestic, local and the global. Consequently, heterarchy provides a framework to explore the ways in which unevenness and complexity structure world politics beyond anarchy. This panel discusses the advances in the research on heterarchy, building on ― and challenging ― the edited volume „Heterarchy in World Politics (Cerny, 2023). Specifically, the panel explores the uneven structures of heterarchy, their interconnectedness, and the structuring potential of heterarchy itself. As the collected papers show, due to increasing heterarchy, states become reactive to the external environment, non-state and sub-state actors. They participate in structuring the complexity, and heterarchy itself becomes a systemic feature of world politics today. Consequently, the papers showcase how heterarchical structures constitute world politics. The discussion embraces the latest waves of heterarchy scholarship as a theory of world politics and puts its proponents in dialogue with critics.
