World Politics and Conflict Systems: The Communication of a "No" and its Effects

In this article I discuss, from a systems theoretical perspective, the relationship between the system of world politics, on the one hand, and conflict understood as a social system in its own right, on the other. I argue more specifically that in contrast to an explicit or implicit assumption in most IR scholarship, conflicts can best be understood as complex and self-reproducing social systems. Conflicts are, theoretically speaking, not part of the world political system. They rather are an external ‘irritation’ to which the (world) political system constantly has to relate, sometimes absorbing these conflicts, sometimes being absorbed by them. While world politics are full of conflicts, the emergence and evolution of conflicts is unfolding independently of, yet in a process of structural coupling with world politics. The article is divided in three main sections in which I discuss, (1) the centrality of conflicts in world politics, (2) the systems theoretical take on conflicts, and (3) realms of applicability for a theoretically guided study of order (Herrschaft) and contestations to order in world politics.