From Boundary-Making to Domination: Integrating Wittgenstein and Bourdieu to Explain International Hierarchy

Join us for the Centre for Contemporary Political Theory's next research seminar.

Hengfeng Zhao (School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds) will present a paper entitled ‘From Boundary-Making to Domination: Integrating Wittgenstein and Bourdieu to Explain International Hierarchy’. 

Abstract

How does contingent, everyday practice crystallize into durable relations of domination? This paper argues that boundaries – dynamic "sites of difference" where categorical distinctions are negotiated – provide a helpful heuristic. While international relations scholarship increasingly recognizes hierarchy as pervasive in global politics, existing analyses observe hierarchical outcomes – status competitions, stigmatization, differential ranking – without a practice-theoretic account of how these relations emerge from everyday interactions.

Hierarchies depend on such distinctions: between "great powers" and "lesser states," the "civilized" and the "backward," elite club members and those excluded. Yet boundaries are not static lines or pre-given categories. Following sociologist Andrew Abbott (1995), they are active processes where social distinctions are enacted through practice. Crucially, boundaries do more than separate – they simultaneously define membership and rank. This paper develops a praxeological framework (grounded in the study of practice) to analyze boundary-making as the mechanism bridging contingent action and durable hierarchy.

The framework integrates Hofius' (2023) ethnomethodological and Wittgensteinian approach to boundary work, which argues how order emerges through situated negotiation and continuous "deontic scorekeeping," with Bourdieu's practice theory emphasizing symbolic power, capital accumulation, and misrecognition. This synthesis offers an insight: boundary work is not merely differentiation, but classification struggle – a contest over the symbolic power to impose the legitimate principles of vision and division (nomos) that define both group membership and hierarchical rank in international society.

From this framework, I generate a novel typology of boundary-making strategies organized around two theoretically grounded axes: group definition (whether actors reinforce or erode boundaries between collectivities) and social rank (whether actors engage with or de-emphasize hierarchical ordering). This typology yields four strategic logics – status competitor, pluralist, aspirant, and universalist – unifying disparate concepts in IR scholarship, including status-seeking, stigma management, and norm contestation and is applied to China’s strategies to shape global cyber governance.

This study intervenes directly in the practice turn in International Relations, responding to calls to engage its full spectrum beyond a narrow “Bourdieusianism" (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015). By combining the critical tradition's focus on domination (Bourdieu) with the pragmatist tradition's attention to situated, contingent ordering (Hofius/Wenger), it offers a foundation for analyzing how power-laden hierarchies emerge from the ground up.