DIMENSIONS OF INTERNATIONAL HIERARCHY IN THE POSTSOVIET SPACE: ANALYTICAL APPROACHES AND EMPIRICAL REFLECTIONS Vahagn R. Aglyan Public Administration Chair Yerevan State University Alek Manukyan str., 1, Yerevan, Armenia, 0025 The article is dedicated to dimensions of international hierarchy in the post-soviet space. <...> Given the traditional divide between domestic and international domains of political life, hierarchy as an ordering principle is traditionally ascribed to the domestic sphere of the modern state, whereas anarchy is the feature characterizing the relations between states on international arena. <...> The thesis of anarchy as structuring principle of International Relations is a widely acknowledged and, in fact, prevailing conceptual argument for almost all the major strands of thought in IR. <...> International anarchy as a system-level phenomenon of international arena does not a priori presupposes the chaos in relations between the basic units of the world politics — the states, — yet the absence of central and legitimately accepted global government patterned along the domestic political framework is a matter of fact. <...> On the other hand, the neoliberal institutionalists believe that effects of international anarchy could potentially be mitigated through the variety of institutionalized liberal practices and frameworks of cooperation. <...> At the same time, the modes of hegemony employed 185 Вестник РУДН, серия Международные отношения, 2014, № 4 in practice greatly influence the “status” of real hierarchy sustained/exercised by the dominant state. <...> Besides the social (contractual) character as an explanative base, another explanation of international hierarchy existence rest on econometric approach of structuring dualistic relations between the sovereign states. <...> And, as interpretation of historical evidence could helpfully suggest [7], the states are interested to collaborate in security realm not so much under the coercive arrangements of the single hegemonic state, but rather by analogy with private firms that are eager to reduce the transaction costs in competitive setting through the institutionalized formats of interactions. <...> What is important in this context is the notion of transaction costs and governance costs; one of the major building blocks of the Williamson's model borrowed by the international affairs scholars for the conceptual and analytical framing of hierarchal pattern of relations among the sovereign states as among economic units (firms) [8]. <...> After the Soviet demise, the post-Soviet Eurasia emerged as geopolitical area predisposed for a hierarchal structuring of interstate relations. <...> Due to space <...>