The literature on de facto states challenges the conventional identification of states by legal recognition, proposing to identify states based on their effectiveness instead. Yet, as I argue in this paper, rather than turning the tables on recognition, the de facto state challenge ultimately reveals all state identification in International Relations and international law to be essentially indeterminate. This lacuna, I suggest, is not an accidental omission, but an expression of the foundational paradox of modern political order that is rooted in the intertwined ontology of the state system and the individual states constituting it, with each presupposing the other. As a result, the opposition between empirical facts, political decisions, and legal norms invoked in attempts to identify states cannot but remain irresolvable. This should not be regarded as a problem to be overcome, however, but as a source of social order. Although states cannot be substantively identified, any effort to do so in practice naturalizes the state as the very form through which we articulate and shape political claims, conflicts, and settlements. In performatively enacting states precisely at the contested margins, state identification thus both invokes and (re-)produces the statist international as the central imaginary of modern political order.

Although there has been widespread attention to the apparent rise of a transnational society of cross-border non-state actors alongside the international society of states, transnational society and international society have traditionally been treated as distinctive domains with different institutions. This article, by contrast, aims to transform theorization of world order through its investigation of how actors in transnational society have developed institutions that mirror in notable respects some of the primary institutions of the international society of states such as through serving constitutive and regulative functions. In addition to delineating these institutions of transnational society, the article interrogates the interdependence of these institutions of transnational society and those of international society, as well as their differences and repercussions for world order. The analysis considers how, in conjunction with the contribution of institutions of international society to international order, institutions of transnational society contribute to transnational order. By exploring not only the tensions between but also the complementarities of transnational and interstate institutions, the article both provides a reinterpretation of contemporary world order and helps reveal the potential for its more harmonious operation.

There is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan's (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.

As emerging powers rise and established powers decline, international institutions come under pressure to adjust to new power realities. When and how do international institutions adapt to underlying global power shifts? We propose an (institutionalist) theory of strategic co-optation that differs from both (realist) accommodationist and (liberal) integrationist theories. Drawing on isolated treatments of strategic co-optation from other domains – domestic and international, autocratic and democratic, past and present – we develop a theory of strategic co-optation as a mode of institutional adaption to shifts in the global distribution of power. The theory specifies the concept, the conditions and the (unintended) consequences of strategic co-optation. We conceptualize co-optation as a specific form of adaptation where established powers trade institutional privileges for emerging powers' institutional support. We theorize the conditions under which emerging and established powers are (more or less) likely to strike a co-optation deal. In addition, we identify endogenous dynamics that may render co-optation precarious and thus subject to instabilities. While the ambition of this paper is primarily theoretical, we provide various empirical illustrations of how strategic co-optation is used to adapt international institutions to contemporary shifts in the global distribution of power.

Although in principle states can bargain over the entire extent of their combined territory, we observe historically that states bargain within far more limited confines defined by well-bounded claims. We argue that this observation stems from the fact that states generally have limited territorial aims due either to limited benefits of obtaining additional territory and/or the costs of absorbing and controlling new territories and their inhabitants. Using a formal model, we show that introducing states with limited aims over territory has strategic implications for bargaining that have not been appreciated in canonical models that do not consider heterogeneity in state preferences. Whereas traditional models generally imply that small demands undermine the credibility of a challenger's threat, the existence of states with limited territorial aims makes limited demands credible, effective, and stable in the face of shocks to relative power. We then employ geospatial data on the geographic extent of territorial disputes in the period 1947–2000 to establish two results: the size of claims is weakly related to the relative power of disputants and unaffected by dramatic changes in power, and smaller claims are associated with a higher probability that the challenger will receive any concession.