Hierarchies of Worth

Race and the Distribution of Concern in World Politics. Book manuscript under review.

Why do states sometimes absorb substantial costs to protect some foreign populations while treating much smaller costs as prohibitive for others? I call this inequality the distribution of concern, which is the variation in the political weight states attach to people beyond their own political communities. I develop this argument into a general theory of international hierarchy. I show that a single global hierarchy does not organize international order. Instead, it is marked by an architecture of different positions that depend on the given area of international politics.

I use a measurement model to compare countries’ positions across seven areas of international politics: diplomacy, international organizations, treaty formation, mobility, trade, cross-border banking, and investment agreements. In the 2019 data, two related dimensions emerge: state connectedness and mobility-linked access.

India, for example, occupies a favorable position in diplomatic and organizational hierarchies while its citizens occupy a considerably less favorable one in international mobility. I show that the hierarchies are remarkably durable within each area, and their racial structures vary across domains. I then show how race structures both dimensions and shapes whose claims governments treat as worth the cost.

I argue that race and racism are central to the contemporary and historical emergence of this architecture. But the results show that there is not a single global racial hierarchy. Instead, these racialized positions matter differently in different areas of international politics.