How the Threat of War Builds Hierarchy — And Shapes Future Conflict

🧭 The Puzzle:

Scholars treat hierarchical international order and war as important but largely separate topics, despite empirical work showing a strong link between them. This research addresses that gap by modeling how the threat of war and hierarchical order are mutually formative parts of a single, recursive process.

🔬 How the Model Works:

• A generative computational network model is used to capture interactions among states.
• The model is grounded in canonical theories of hierarchy and conflict and explicitly represents a feedback loop: the threat of war drives the formation of hierarchy, and that hierarchy in turn alters states' incentives to wage war.
• The approach focuses on process and mechanism rather than simple correlations, showing how micro-level interactions produce macro-level order.

📌 Key Findings:

• The threat of war systematically produces hierarchical arrangements among states.
• Once established, hierarchy reshapes incentives, making certain patterns of conflict more or less likely.
• The model reproduces a range of well-known regularities about hierarchical order and conflict documented in the literature.
• Surprisingly, several classic international-relations results emerge from this interplay, including:
• institutional persistence,
• balancing behavior, and
• systemic self-regulation.

🔎 Why It Matters:

This work connects two literatures that have been empirically linked but theoretically separated. By showing that hierarchy and war are two elements of a recursive process, the model explains familiar empirical patterns and reveals that many traditional IR phenomena can be understood as emergent outcomes of the war–hierarchy interaction. The findings have implications for how scholars interpret institutional durability, balancing strategies, and the self-organizing tendencies of the international system.