02 – Chapter 02 – Bigo 1 International Political Sociology: rethinking the international through dynamics of power Didier Bigo Setting the scene How to analyse and to describe the various ways power aggregates, concentrates and circulates in the world; a world which is politically fragmented, but where everyday lives are interconnected? This is one of the central interrogations that scholars of international political sociology seek to explore. Nowadays, most scholars remain dissatisfied with current forms of analysis of power that consider simply that the regulation by territorial states of questions of politics, economy and society is sufficient for analysing the flows of exchange and their world convolutions. Starting with states and the international system is a particular way of problematizing power and politics in terms of conjunctions (power politics), of homogenising them (politics is power), of reading historical trajectories through the lenses of a political order that is also a social order, and of transforming the state into an actor that subsumes its multitude and tries to regulate an ‘inter-state’ system along its interest and/or values. Once, one is ready to reject a world imagined as divided into mutually exclusive territorial states, without accepting too easily the idea of a long march towards a global world adjusting politics to the conditions of a global market, the problem of what the international today is, becomes a mesmerizing subject matter. The line of thought of International Political Sociology is born from this willingness to reopen the question of the international. In this chapter, I will argue that the roots of dissatisfaction concerning a vision of the international as an upper level regarding states and individuals lay in the assumptions of the traditional answers coming from the discipline of political science where international relations are conceived both as a specific sphere and as a separate level distinct from governmental politics, as well as, from the false alternative of a depoliticised global sociology, which is searching for a global social “whole” replacing the Hegelian dream of a world state by a more systemic approach of contradictions, but reducing always struggles to dysfunction. By contrast, the positioning of International Political Sociology scholars is distinctive. IPS thinks the international as the lengthening of chains of interdependences between actors that evolves either along centripetal or centrifugal dynamics. This allows first,