Status in World Politics
Abstract
Rising powers such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Turkey are increasingly claiming heightened profiles in international politics. Although differing in other respects, rising states have a strong desire for recognition and respect. This pioneering volume on status features contributions that develop propositions on status concerns and illustrate them with case studies and aggregate data analysis. Four cases are examined in depth: the United States how it accommodates rising powers through hierarchy), Russia (the influence of status concerns on its foreign policy), China (how Beijing signals its status aspirations), and India (which has long sought major power status). The authors analyze status from a variety of theoretical perspectives and tackle questions such as: How do states signal their status claims? How are such signals perceived by the leading states? Will these status concerns lead to conflict, or is peaceful adjustment possible?
... Indeed, the mediator can aim at 'enhancing his reputation or pleasing his constituency' (Wall, 1981: 160). In turn, a country's diplomatic clout can raise other actors' perceptions of that country's position in the global order, thereby improving its status (Paul et al., 2014). Turkey's constructive role was hailed by several international leaders-including high-ranking members of the US government, with which Ankara has been facing an increasing number of issues and disagreements, especially since the failed coup in 2016 (Kutlay & Öniş, 2021). ...
Turkish officials stress that their neutral and impartial, tarafsız , position enables Ankara to mediate in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The country has been one of the key external political and diplomatic players in the context of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine since February 2022. Ankara has acted as a mediator since the early days of the invasion and tried—so far, successfully—to balance being pro-Ukrainian without being openly anti-Russian. This chapter maintains that Turkey’s attitude confirms the academic literature’s descriptions of Turkey’s foreign policy as growing more independent and seeking to balance its external relations. In particular, the Turkish government’s motives revolve around three main foreign policy objectives: boosting status (through mediation activities), carrying out a balancing strategy in its external relations, and pursuing economic interests through trade engagement with Moscow. Meanwhile, diffuse anti-Western sentiments and a severe economic crisis seemingly have led the Turkish society towards more inward-looking positions and a certain lack of empathy towards Ukrainians. All in all, questions remain on the sustainability of Turkey’s neutral approach, especially in the case of a further military—and, possibly, nuclear—escalation.
... This FOMO mechanism has been cited as the reason why individuals often overuse smartphones, sleep too little, or abuse drugs, despite recognizing that such behavior contradicts privately-held beliefs or values [16]. We apply this insight, which is related to the implications of other social-psychological considerations such as status [17] and reputation [18] on personal behavior [19], to AI. We argue that FOMO may explain why individuals support the use of AI-enabled technologies that they do not trust. ...
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are poised to transform society, national defense, and the economy by increasing efficiency, precision, and safety. Yet, widespread adoption within society depends on public trust and willingness to use AI-enabled technologies. In this study, we propose the possibility of an AI “trust paradox,” in which individuals’ willingness to use AI-enabled technologies exceeds their level of trust in these capabilities. We conduct a two-part study to explore the trust paradox. First, we conduct a conjoint analysis, varying different attributes of AI-enabled technologies in different domains—including armed drones, general surgery, police surveillance, self-driving cars, and social media content moderation—to evaluate whether and under what conditions a trust paradox may exist. Second, we use causal mediation analysis in the context of a second survey experiment to help explain why individuals use AI-enabled technologies that they do not trust. We find strong support for the trust paradox, particularly in the area of AI-enabled police surveillance, where the levels of support for its use are both higher than other domains but also significantly exceed trust. We unpack these findings to show that several underlying beliefs help account for public attitudes of support, including the fear of missing out, optimism that future versions of the technology will be more trustworthy, a belief that the benefits of AI-enabled technologies outweigh the risks, and calculation that AI-enabled technologies yield efficiency gains. Our findings have important implications for the integration of AI-enabled technologies in multiple settings.
Different units of international politics, such as states or the church, cannot be present in their entirety during international interactions. Political rule needs to be represented for international actors to coordinate their activities. Representants (i.e. maps, GDP, buildings, and diplomatic and warfare practices) establish collective understandings about the nature of authority and its configuration. Whilst representants are not exact replica, they highlight and omit certain features from the units they stand in for. In these inclusions and exclusions lies representants' irreducible effect. This book studies how representants define the units of the international system and position them in relation to each other, thereby generating an international order. When existing representants change, the international order changes because the units are defined differently and stand in different relations to each other. Power is therefore defined differently. Spanning centuries of European history, Alena Drieschova traces the struggles between actors over these representations.
This paper investigates these questions from the perspective of official Chinese discourses related to the South China Sea dispute. Beginning with the key assumption that what matters more to understanding how the Chinese view the international order is not what they say but how they say it, this article uses a mixed-method approach to critical discourse analysis in order to unpack the implicit meanings of official Chinese narratives. The quantitative analysis of these speeches reveals that emotions (humiliation, anger, and feelings of superiority) are important, along with the political use of history to create narratives aiming to legitimize China's desire to remove the United States from the management of Asia-Pacific issues. The paper will also show that while the Chinese discourse remains the same under all US administrations, the Chinese legal discourse has fluctuated as the dispute has evolved. Such findings provide a better understanding of Chinese political communication on international law and on the present international order.
Recently, a ‘tech war’ between the United States and China has emerged, as the United States aims to maintain its technological supremacy while restricting China's access to critical technologies. However, the drivers and implications of the tech war are poorly understood, as great power scholars typically adopt an instrumental view of technology as a tool of state power. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies, this article challenges the conception of the tech war as merely one area of competition among others. It asks how sociotechnical imaginaries—distinct sets of values, institutions, conventions, and symbols through which members of a political community imagine their past, present, and future—shape U.S. elite discourse on technology in its great power relations, particularly in the contexts of the Cold War and the U.S.–China tech war. Based on a frame analysis of U.S. elite tech discourse on the Soviet Union during the Cold War and China in the present, the article finds that policy elites rely on sociotechnical imaginaries to associate technology's possible negative effects in society with a geopolitical rival to construct and justify a geopolitical agenda. This allows domestic sociotechnical life to be ordered according to the overriding needs of a narrow, security-oriented national interest. The analysis draws attention to the cultural, social, and political dynamics underpinning technology's role in great power politics and thus calls for a more multifaceted understanding of contemporary great power rivalry and the tech war.
Affective ties encompass a broad family of emotional phenomena, including love, affection, attachment, and devotion. Affective ties may appear deeply personal, and they most certainly are. But they are also important resources for the exercise of political power in international politics – not only as vulnerabilities that can be exploited for coercion but also, and more significantly, as means to mobilise action and sacrifice. Viewed from the vantage point of political agents, affective ties are thus power resources whose distribution in the international system shapes their strategies and choices. Viewed from the perspective of the system, the international realm is not only characterised by struggles over material capabilities or ideas but also competition over affective ties. Correspondingly, nationalism is not simply an identity. It is a collection of techniques and practices for generating and capturing affective ties that has emerged as a highly effective contender in this contest, with crucial implications for how the international system is organised. That being said, other forms of eliciting affective ties also persist.
International organizations play an important, if imperfect, role in world politics, solving collective action problems in security, economic, environmental, and global health among others. While many believe that international organisations have formed critical pillars of global governance, sceptics contend that they reflect the power politics of the day and the interests of hegemonic powers. This volume examines whether international organizations contribute to or detract from peaceful change, acting as agents of both status quo and stasis. Providing a historical overview of international organizations, from the nineteenth century to the current day, a team of leading scholars offer an overview of how major theoretical approaches – Liberalism, Constructivism, Rationalism and Realism – have contributed to our understanding of the role played by international organizations in peaceful change. In particular, the roles of the United Nations General Assembly, UN Peacekeeping, UN Environment Program, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization and G20 are analysed.
This article explores the temporality and manipulability of status symbols. The competition over status has started to move past traditional markers such as economic wealth and military strength, and new status symbols have emerged that may become attainable even for states without such traditional forms of capital. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, we develop a discursive approach to status symbols that distinguishes three phases of their life cycle – creation, institutionalisation and capitalisation – to show how certain practices and achievements are turned into new status symbols and how these status symbols can be converted into other forms of capital. We illustrate this approach by studying the role of the Conference of the Parties (COP) presidency and performance rankings as status symbols of leadership in global climate politics. As the field of climate politics is premised on assumptions of a greater common good, we also aim to explore whether and how status symbols can be strategically used as incentives for status competition with desirable outcomes.
The article is concerned with the application of the concept of international roles for small states occupying the bottom floor of the international hierarchy. As is known, traditionally small states are characterized by low status, essential lack of influence on international affairs and complete dependence on great powers. At the same time, taking into account the sheer size of the group, it is possible to identify a subgroup of small states that are able to effectively employ their available resources and play a comparable role with middle or even great powers in world politics. In order to identify significant international roles, a typology is proposed that takes into account the main spheres of international interaction and the type of reference object for which the state in question plays a significant role (global, regional or dyadic levels). Such systematization of significant roles allows comparing vastly different countries, for instance, those belonging to different classes of the international hierarchy, including small, medium and leading states. In addition, the axis of reference objects in the typology allows to reflect an important sociological component of a role, which distinguishes it from a function. Based on the proposed typology of significant international roles, the article goes on to analyze the transformation of the roles of small Middle Eastern monarchies – namely, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in contemporary world politics, which constitute some of the most successful examples of small states that have achieved significant agency at the beginning of the 21st century.
A diverse group of governments have accepted “Major Non-NATO Ally” (MNNA) status since the designation's establishment in the late 1980s. This United States (U.S.) designation signals friendship and facilitates cooperation, but it provides no formal security commitments. Why and when have U.S. partners accepted MNNA status? I argue that designees will accept the status when they are ready to acknowledge America's appreciation—a perceptual and relational concept that conveys gratitude absent guarantees. For some designees, untimely embrace of U.S. appreciation could negatively impact their relations with their societies and/or third-party states. For others, accepting appreciation would preclude forming a formal alliance with the U.S. I analyze published sources and incorporate interviews to compare Qatar, which accepted MNNA status in 2022, and the United Arab Emirates, which has not accepted the status as of late 2024. This article contributes to the literature on asymmetric security alignments by centering the Gulf governments and it provides a timely evaluation of an underexplored aspect of global alliance politics.
Existing research has documented that status-seeking abounds in world politics. Yet the status hierarchies to which states respond and compete within are notoriously ambiguous and difficult to empirically ascertain. This ambiguity has begotten considerable disagreement among scholars over the nature of international hierarchies. Making a strength out of this slipperiness, this article posits that international status can be studied via the everyday theories of status that governments and their opponents themselves produce and use to interpret their state’s status. Treating these everyday theories as productive of the world they purport to describe, such an approach foregrounds the interpretative agency of domestic groups to develop and maintain “hierarchies of their own making,” which need not be recognized internationally to become crucial for policy legitimation domestically. In order to study such everyday theories’ systematically, the article develops a new meta-linguistic framework for identifying and mapping their use within domestic politics. Via a case study on the Boer War (1899–1902), the article shows how domestic battles over what international status is can shape domestic politics and policy outcomes.
This analytical essay highlights the importance of status orders in the study of status and prestige in world politics. Drawing on recent research in the field, I argue that understanding the particular social structures that regulate the status dynamics within social collectives is crucial to understanding how actors seek and receive status in world politics. I review the literature on status in IR and introduce the concept of status orders as context-specific and local social structures that determine what is considered prestigious within a particular group, community, or club. Using examples from war-making, nuclear weapons, and diplomatic practice, I argue that the fact that status dynamics is often produced locally and not globally forces us to focus less on “universal” aspirations for status, and more on where that actor sought status from and eventually according to which yardstick that actor experienced a change in status.
Abstracts
American exceptionalism is enjoying a revival of scholarly interest amid new approaches to studying foreign policy narratives and unease regarding how US policymakers will manage a less unipolar international system. That revival coincides temporally, though not yet substantively, with growing attention to racialized dynamics and Eurocentrism within international relations. This article examines how core strands of American exceptionalism—the prevailing narrative framing of US foreign policy—reflect a whitewashed understanding of US foreign policy that can best be understood as the product of racialized subject-positioning that saturated its historical development. After conceptualizing American exceptionalism, it develops a theoretical framework to capture how racialized subject-positioning stratifies understandings of a nation’s role in the world. It proceeds to investigate how this process shaped the development of American exceptionalism in line with epistemologies of immanence, ignorance, and innocence, producing exceptionalist narratives that neglect non-white populations as meaningful others in the construction of US national identity and that negate US interactions with those groups as relevant evidence that might undercut its exceptionalism. These whitewashing effects remained embedded even as overtly racist discourse became delegitimized, posing enduring obstacles for US diplomacy today.
How can a signal of extended deterrence, such as prepositioning of foreign military forces, signify status for the beneficiaries of the allied deterrence/reassurance chain? This article explores how the manifestation and communication of allied deterrence can concurrently constitute an affectively charged status symbol for the protégé states of this international security practice. It does so on the example of the Baltic states and Poland, probing the presence and functionality of the American forces as a status marker in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s eastern flank states after 2014. Engaging discourse analysis and expert interviews, the article shows (1) how the intersubjectively determined success of deterrence is dependent on historically potent symbols which have become emblematic of extended deterrence and (2) how deterrence icons can simultaneously serve as multifarious status symbols in intra-alliance politics. The self-identification of protégé states as worthy stakes to deter over emerges as an ambivalent status position defined by the shortage of attributes, rather than a function of their tally. The article contributes to the understanding of the symbolic form of (allied) deterrence and the multivocal status value ascribed to the American ‘boots on the ground’.
Аннотация
Меняющийся характер системы международных отношений и процесс перехода от однополярности к многополярности и оказывают прямое воздействие на регион Центральной Азии и внешнеполитическую деятельность двух ключевых игроков – Российской Федерации и Турецкой Республики. В работе автор рассмотрел их основные элементы сотрудничества и соперничества в Центральной Азии. Проанализированы ключевые области и точки соприкосновения региональной политики России и Турции: экономика, интеграционная политика, военно-техническое сотрудничество, реализация «мягкой силы». Сделан вывод о существовании в российской и турецкой политиках определенного баланса в вопросах сотрудничества и соперничества в Центральной Азии и перспективности развития отношений России и Турции в контексте взаимодействия на региональном уровне.
Ключевые слова: кризис гегемонии, многополярность, Российская Федерация, Турецкая Республика, сотрудничество, соперничество
There has been a crucial yet under-appreciated shift in the significance of World Heritage prestige itself, as World Heritage has also emerged as a key venue for international status-seeking in relation to culture. This chapter shows how this has elevated the stakes in the World Heritage regime, with important implications for the protection-prestige nexus. Whether it is their first or fiftieth site inscription, World Heritage has become activated by States Parties in a diverse range of status-related ends. To illuminate this dimension, the chapter establishes the relationship—and distinction—between prestige and international status, to reveal how the prestige of individual World Heritage sites becomes aggregated towards advancing a state’s broader pursuit of status. World Heritage sites signal states’ tasteful consumption in a process of international distinction. World Heritage also figures within global city and country rankings through which states and cities, large and small, seek to differentiate themselves. The crucial question here is the effect this elevation of the World Heritage regime to status-seeking venue may have on the interrelated logics of protection and prestige.
The gap between Russia’s aspirations to become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to do so has become increasingly more visible, especially following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. I examine the mismatch between the Russian leadership’s AI narrative and the country’s technological capabilities via the lens of Russia’s quest for great power status and ontological security. Connecting literatures on status-seeking, ontological security, and narratives in International Relations, I show the need to scrutinise narratives surrounding technology, especially AI technologies and their associated ambiguities, as part of how states deal with the constant uncertainty about recognition of their self-perceived identity. Based on an analysis of textual and visual documents collected via open-access sources, I find that the Russian official AI narrative embeds three of the elements forming Russia’s conception of a great power, namely the ability to compete, modernise, and attain technological sovereignty. It features a plot where the state is the main protagonist leading Russia towards AI leadership despite the obstacles it is facing. Although the official rhetoric does not match the reality of Russian capabilities, the narrative is used as a cognitive tool in the quest for identity during times of uncertainty.
This article focuses on the supply side of status recognition in the liberal international order (LIO). The order’s liberal milieu breeds hierarchies among states, which in turn generate certain exigencies for recognition. Although states receive ‘thin’ recognition, the order fails to structurally acknowledge their worth, value and uniqueness, or ‘thick’ recognition. This inconsistency lies at the heart of the order’s recognition regime and serves as a source of frustration and revisionism. Since recognition needs are not saturated systemically, an opening emerges for non-systemic grants of recognition, which are mostly conferred by a select core of liberal states. I unpack the said inconsistency in the LIO’s recognition regime and concentrate on the production of non-systemic grants of recognition and their practical implications. I identify the non-systemic grants of recognition as an effective, yet problematic characteristic of the recognition regime because they further exacerbate hierarchies based on a specific understanding of merit. In operationalizing the process of status recognition in the particular milieu of the LIO, the piece introduces a heuristic framework for qualitatively assessing the perceived functional worth of states and provides empirical examples.
The concluding section of this book discusses the importance of understanding the differences between Brazil’s status aspirations and the level of prestige it gets from an external intersubjective perspective. Although the country seems to face barriers to rise and break through the international status quo, the analysis of the foreign perceptions of its status provides a very important point of reference that can help guide foreign policy decisions in its search for prestige. The way Brazil has been pursuing status seems from the outside not to be effective, and a more consistent and clear agenda taking this into account could help the state pursue its interests with more chances of making them become real. If the country decides to continue its pursuit of high status, following what can be learned from the perception of the FPC of great powers, Brazil should focus less on trying to gain status and more on actions that gradually put the state in the centre of important matters of international politics. Instead of inflating the rhetoric, Brazil should focus on stabilizing domestic issues and developing its economy, leaving an expansion of its international role to be a consequence of this development.
The case study of Brazil’s status aspirations and frustrated quest for prestige exposes what could be interpreted as a failure to increase the status of one state. However, it may also offer clues about the immobility of the status quo, the difficulties faced by other states aspiring to increase their prestige and the strategies they could adopt in their pursuit of higher status. This chapter builds on the case study of Brazil’s intersubjective status to set out a theory-building element in order to develop hypotheses to understand how states that aspire to achieve the status of a great power can act to shift status and graduate to be recognized as a part of the group of states that are established as great powers. Based on the analysis of the interviews in this research, the chapter proposes a typology of five strategies states can follow when aspiring to attempt to be recognized as having high status.
Brazil has not been able to achieve the status it aspired for, and it is perceived by great powers as a state that is not particularly important in global politics, but that the powerful nations want to have by their side in international disputes. This chapter introduces a summary of the main empirical findings about the intersubjective status of the country from the study presented in the book. It addresses the gap in the scholarship about Brazil’s status by providing an assessment of where the state stands in the international stratified society, based on the intersubjective interpretations of the FPC of the P5. The chapter offers a contribution to this scholarship by proposing new interpretations of Brazil’s standing from the perception of more powerful states, discussing what role these great powers believe the state has to play in international politics, and the limitations of the actions of Brazilian foreign policy. It addresses the perception powerful states have that Brazil is a coveted pawn in international politics, explaining how the state is not seen as particularly significant, but at the same time is wanted as an ally by the states of the P5.
Defined as the rank of an actor in the hierarchy of a group, status is referred to in international relations as a state’s position within a social stratification of states. Although it has long been present in the literature, it was only in the 2000s that it began to establish itself as a mainstream approach to IR. This chapter presents a theoretical framework based on the intersubjective character of status. It is based on the argument that it is important to verify status by analysing external perceptions in order to try to understand the social recognition of one's level of prestige. It begins by introducing the concept of status, follows by discussing the stratification of states in the international society and proceeds to present the multidisciplinary origins of the concept of status. It follows the evolution of its use in IR as well as its connections to the study of power and continues to assess connections and differences between internal and external perceptions, which can lead to status inconsistencies and even ontological insecurity. The chapter also briefly outlines the research design used in the study presented in the book and assesses the methodological challenges to analysing status in IR.
The following paper represents the review of the geopolitical status of the state as a category of geopolitics. The author introduces the comprehension dynamics of the geopolitical status of the state in the theories of classical geopolitics and modern researchers. The paper emphasizes the difficulties in categorizing the geopolitical status of the state as a subject of power distribution/redistribution, its resources and functions in the multidimensional geopolitical space. The concept of ‘geopolitical status of the state’ is clarified through an analysis of related concepts of ‘social status’, ‘legal status’, ‘political status’, as well as operationalization of the notion of ‘geopolitical space’. The author remarks with regard to the geopolitical status of the state, on the one hand, it structurally regulates the role configuration of the world order and allows the states to participate more effectively in the global competition. At the same time, on the other hand, it is often used as a manipulative technology in fixing the asymmetry of power relations between states in the ‘dominance – subordination’ format, as well as a technology of geopolitical stigmatization of states in their subjective marginalization.
The field of international security studies drastically evolved over the last few decades. Critical security studies emerged as one trend, seeking to make explicit statist orientations of traditional security studies, the Paris School being one such branch, highlighting the role of security professionals and the importance of studying repetitive regimes of practices. Other security trends tilted toward the creation of ontological security studies (OSS), placing importance on the concept of autobiographical narratives, routines, and anxiety—bringing importance to the unconscious drivers of actor behavior in IR. Given the shared focus on regimes of practices, it is surprising that these two schools of thought have not paired together to address questions of security. In this article, I will critically interrogate the literature on OSS and the Paris school, drawing out key debates and questions from both schools of thought. I suggest that although these two areas have previously been treated as separate, there is much potential for synthesizing this literature that opens up new spaces for inquiry.
Despite the growing academic attention to the problem of interference in internal affairs, rhetorical techniques the state uses to legitimize interventions in the eyes of foreign counterparties, remain somewhat understudied in the Russian IR studies. In this regard, the case of the Monroe Doctrine, a landmark ideological construct in the history of international relations and US foreign policy, provides a unique framework for an in-depth study of the practices of legitimization and stigmatization of interventions. The paper examines the role of the doctrine in denouncing the interference of European powers in the domestic affairs of Latin American countries and justifying US actions in the region. The author outlines a set of issues related to legitimizing, both externally and internally, the actions of the state in the international arena. It is shown that the appeal to national interests suitable for solving the problems of domestic political legitimization, turns out to be ineffective in justifying interventions in the eyes of the international community and therefore gives way to references to established traditions and historical narratives. The paper examines the historical background of the 1823 presidential address and the ways how the US foreign policy establishment appealed to it later on, both to promote the idea of the inadmissibility of European interference in the affairs of the countries of the Western Hemisphere, and, subsequently, to justify American interventionism. Special attention is paid to the so-called Roosevelt Corollary, since it allows one to better understand the specifics of the US leaders’ perception of the Monroe Doctrine and to separate them from the distortions and stereotypes formed during the ensuing public debates and uncritically replicated in many academic studies. The author concludes that, though the Monroe Doctrine is regarded as a cornerstone of US foreign policy, in fact it played a limited role in both diplomatic justification and stigmatization of interventions. In this regard, it is more appropriate to consider it as a rhetorical asset rather than a strict guiding principle. In general, the case of the Monroe Doctrine reveals the situational conditionality of the practices legitimizing interventions, resulting in their limited persuasiveness. The latter seems to be almost inevitable given the constitutive importance of the institution of sovereignty for the maintenance of international society.
This study seeks to invigorate research on state power and influence by focusing on external perceptions. To this end, we quantitatively operationalised a refined theoretical model indicating the potential factors that determine a state’s perceived power and influence in two steps. First, we constructed a model based on a six-factor index comprising both hard and soft resources of power. Second, we applied this factorial taxonomy to our country case study—Romania—to test empirically whether our model holds, using original surveys conducted in two neighbouring countries, Ukraine and Moldova. We sought to learn which of these factors is the most impactful and found that a hierarchy of these factors could be established, which varied depending on each country-to-country interaction.
After studying Indonesia’s African approach’s redefinition and its main instigators, then making parallels between Indonesia’s African foreign policy and that of other major Asian powers, this chapter reevaluates the multiple drivers and conceptions of Indonesian foreign policy in general and towards Africa in particular, while interrogating the possibility for Indonesia of being a model in Africa, the necessity of holistic approaches to co-construct meaning and long term success in Africa, and the road to great power for Indonesia as passing through Africa. Before being able to develop a comprehensive African strategy, Indonesia will need to enrich its engagement with Africa, making it more holistic, which means learning more while producing more knowledge on the continent to fulfil its ambitions; otherwise, Indonesia’s African engagement risks bringing disappointment in Africa. Indonesian infrastructural promises made in Africa have, for example, not been delivered, given Indonesia’s lack of financial capacities.
Research on status in international relations has expanded in the last few decades. The key empirical studies suggest that status concern generates an incentive for initiating international conflicts since unilateral military engagement is believed to increase the status of a country. We concur with this argument. However, a further study should be conducted to find whether “multilateral” military engagement can change status perceptions and therefore be related to international politics over status. The test is important since the multilateral use of force is distinct from the unilateral use of force in its theoretical background and its connotation in world politics. In our experiment conducted in Japan, we treat the information on the multilateral use of force, and examine whether variations of the treatment information change people’s self-perception over their country’s international status. The results show that participation in a multilateral use of force increases and an early departure from the multilateral mission out of casualty concerns decreases their country’s self-status perception. Also, we successfully identify that the people who have a high social dominance orientation trait are more susceptible to such information.
This article argues that the well-discussed international behaviour change in Saudi Arabia, rather than being a consequence of the so-called Arab Spring, resulted from a grand strategy reassessment in the early 2000s. Grand strategy concerns how states assess the geostrategic environment, plan resource allocation and prioritize policy to meet national interests. Since the 1970s, Riyadh judged its geopolitical vulnerabilities concerning Iran and Iraq realistically, supporting the least threatening actor from the two and relying on the United States to protect the status quo. However, the 2003 Iraqi invasion forced strategy reevaluation, as it removed Baghdad from the power competition, empowering Tehran, Washington and Riyadh. In this new scenario, Saudi Arabia eventually decides on regional leadership as its priority interest, promoting, thus, partial autonomy from Washington and competition with Tehran. By employing Neoclassical Realism, this article argues that the reevaluation was gradual and in continuity with the monarchical logic. For that, it explores Saudi power position and shifts within status satisfaction and inter-monarchical preferences. Empirically, the article aims to demystify the image of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman as something that turned the tables within the leadership, arguing that changes in the country's international relations preceded his rise to power, being linked to King Abdullah. It concludes that, while Saudi Arabian geopolitical goal was clear for outside observers only after 2011, the planning process takes precedence. Theoretically, by providing insight into Saudi Arabia's status-seeking behaviour, its motivations and potential limitations, the article also contributes to discussions about de-Westernizing Realism by incorporating Middle Eastern contextuality.
Scholars have attempted to theorise the social structure of the international system from the perspective of the ‘middle powers’ for decades. However, scholars have struggled to agree on the essential dispositional characteristics of this category of actors, stunting theoretical progress. Drawing on sociological and literary approaches to the rhetoric of the ‘middle class’ in domestic societies, this article shifts the terms of this debate away from asking who the ‘middle powers’ are or what their ‘essence’ is , to ask what actors do with the term in practice. Combining this with and contributing to scholarship on hierarchy in international relations, I recast ‘middle powers’ as a category of practice and argue that one of the term's main uses is to differentiate certain status-anxious states – that hold no real prospect of achieving great power status – from ‘small states’ that occupy the lowest stratum of stratification within the ‘grading of powers’. Following an illustrative case study of Australian and Canadian attempts to establish the ‘middle power’ category in the 1940s, the article then outlines the contributions of the argument for the study of status and hierarchy in world politics.
Over the past three decades norms research has become a subfield that matters beyond the boundaries of the discipline of International Relations. Like other such generative processes this subfield’s path is marked by debates over conceptual and methodological preferences. This book argues that irrespective of how we understand these divides, the critical question for today’s norms researchers becomes: how have our understandings of norms developed over this period? To address this question this book brings together a range of junior, mid-career, and senior scholars, working at the leading edge of norm research, across a diversity of issues and sub-fields, and using different epistemological perspectives. Two lenses feature in this endeavour: the first considers the history of norm research as a series of three distinct and theoretical moves (i.e., first creating an interest in ideas and social facts in IR, then focusing on norm adaptation, and finally shifting to a view of norms as processes), and the second examines the potential of practices of interpretation and contestation (which we term the ‘interpretation-contestation framework’) as a way of bringing together a range of theoretical tools to understand norm change, evolution, and replacement. In short, this book focuses on the past trajectory of the field to argue that norm research continues to hold significant potential and promise both about theorizing within IR, and for studying current issues and problems in world politics.
Over the past two decades, we have seen a significant shift in the norms literature away from the idea that a norm reflects a fixed and universally accepted shared understanding to notions that any norm – even those which appear to be widely institutionalized in international organisations of global governance – remains subject to contestation and interpretation at multiple sites in world politics. In this concluding chapter, we take up the challenge of studying these diverse types of norms and their meaning, use, and role in practice. We begin by returning to the three moves laid out in the introduction – first creating an interest in ideas and social facts in IR, then focusing on norm adaptation, and finally shifting to a view of norms as processes – and use as a vignette the forced landing of Ryanair Flight 4978 in Belarus in May 2021 to explore how each of these three moves can explain these events. We then draw out three sets of conclusions from the volume’s chapters, focusing on the process of contestation and interpretation, on how we can research contestations, and how other structures can and do interact with norms during these processes. We end by noting that the distinct approaches to norm research developed over the past thirty years do speak to one another in meaningful and innovative ways. By focusing on contestation in a holistic way, we can not only understand norms in a unique way but also how they constitute the world.
There is hardly any aspect of social, political, and economic life today that is not also governed internationally. Drawing on debates around hierarchy, hegemony, and authority in international politics, this volume takes the study of the international 'beyond anarchy' a step further by establishing the concept of rule as the defining feature of order in the international realm. The contributors argue that the manifold conceptual approaches to sub- and superordination in the international should be understood as rich conceptualizations of one concept: rule. Rule allows constellations of sub- and superordination in the international to be seen as multiplex, systemic, and normatively ambiguous phenomena that need to be studied in the context of their interplay and consequences. This volume draws on a variety of conceptualizations of rule, exploring, in particular, the practices of rule as well as the relational and dynamic characteristics of rule in international politics.
The Balkan region has traditionally been of particular importance for Russia, and currently Serbia remains one of the few European countries potentially exposed, due to ideological affinity, to the influence of Russia’s soft power. Memory policy is an important tool in creating and maintaining this affinity because it enables formulation of unifying historical narratives and shared vision of the key events in the common history, thereby providing underpinning for assessments of current developments and for creating an image of the desired future. However, it has its limits and boundaries, and this paper aims at assessing the strength of the Russian-Serbian mnemonic union. The research builds on the concept of ‘mnemonic diplomacy’, which refers to a set of techniques and methods for the affirmation, coordination and dissemination of certain historical narratives designed to support the state’s foreign policy activities. The author argues that the Russian-Serbian memory alliance is based primarily on common assessments of the events of World War II. The paper examines the key stages, internal and external drivers of this mnemonic union development, as well as identifies contradictions and conflicts inherent to this process. The author emphasizes that within the framework of the Russian-Serbian memory alliance both parties have always pursued their own goals. For instance, Serbia sought to use it to increase its weight in the Balkan and, more broadly, European politics, as well as to strengthen relations with its traditional geopolitical ally. For Russia, this mnemonic alliance acquired particular significance when the country’s leaders set a course for transforming the post-Cold War world order. However, it was exactly this new turn of Russia’s foreign policy whose most visible manifestation was the launch of the special military operation in Ukraine that dramatically complicated Serbia’s position, including that in the field of memory politics. At the same time it has revealed the limits of the Russian-Serbian mnemonic union. The author concludes that the effectiveness of mnemonic diplomacy and, more broadly, the very possibility of forming and maintaining mnemonic alliances, ultimately depend on a combination of objective factors, including close economic ties and mutual geopolitical interest. Pushed outside this comfort zone, complementary historical narratives built solely on the appeal to the common heritage quickly lose their power of attraction.
This thesis studies Norway’s contributions of police officers to South Sudan as part of the United Nations Mission In South Sudan (UNMISS), and to Afghanistan as part of the Norwegian Police Support to Afghan Authorities Project (NORAF), and what the rationale for Norway is for participating in international operations with police officers. My problem statement is to what degree can Norway’s participation with police officers in international operations be explained as an action to seek status. This is studied through evaluating Norway’s actions as an attempt to be perceived as either a moral authority or a reliable partner by looking at Norway’s goals and commitments, Norway’s contribution to UNMISS and NORAF, and exploring what Norway has gained through these contributions. Studying this problem statement has been approached through a qualitative approach using 12 qualitative interviews, participation observations and document analysis. My findings show that status seeking is an important part of Norway’s participation with police officers in
international operations. When comparing NORAF and UNMISS, the goal to maintain
Norway’s status concerning its bilateral and multilateral relations has been reached, while Norway has been less successful with reaching its goals concerned with development assistance. In addition, Norway has prioritized to be perceived as a reliable partner rather than, and often at the expense of, being perceived as a moral authority. This means that Norway’s contribution of police officers to international operations – originally meant as a tool of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for development assistance – is also used for seeking international status.
International order and revisionism are key concepts in international affairs. This chapter reviews the theoretical state of the art and builds on its insights and shortcomings. First, it conceptualizes revisionism as a dependent variable and formulates revisionist ideal types. Second, the chapter compares the assumptions of grand theories of international relations—neorealism, institutionalism, constructivism—on international order and revisionism and refutes them as too statist. Third, it discusses where neorealist research can and must be amended to increase its explanatory value.
When do states pursue status enhancement through peacekeeping and how do they go about it? This article argues that states’ contributions to peace operations can be related to attempts at acquiring a positive identity in the international arena through membership in highly ranked groups. Drawing on insights from social identity theory and peacekeeping and burden-sharing research, the article elaborates on how states choose an identity management strategy that involves peacekeeping practices, the factors influencing states’ ability to pursue status through peacekeeping, and the conditions for succeeding in acquiring the desired social identity. Ukraine's significant peacekeeping engagement in the first two decades following independence represents an intriguing case of an emerging state positioning itself in the international and regional systems, which makes it a relevant case study to explore. Therefore, the article discusses how two of Ukraine's formative peacekeeping experiences have fostered, or alternatively undermined, the pursuit of a positive social identity, first as a sovereign state and member of the broader international community and second as an aspiring member of the Western community of states.
Global opinion surveys show that Brazil is not perceived by the world as a serious country. Going beyond general views about the nation, this paper analyses intersubjective perceptions of the foreign policy community of great powers to understand whether Brazil is recognised as a serious player in world politics. These intersubjective views are important because they can determine the international prestige of a nation. Using a theoretical framework of status in international relations and based on reflexive thematic analysis of primary data from elite interviews, this paper discusses how serious Brazil is perceived to be by powerful states. It argues that while there is not a consensus over the reputation of the country, Brazil tends to be taken seriously as long as it plays into great powers’ interests. Furthermore, it builds on the case of Brazil to discuss the use of the concept of seriousness in international relations and develop hypotheses about its meaning.
As Romania has recurrently indicated in recent years that the main external objective is to consolidate the country’s profile in the region and, in particular, in its immediate eastern neighbourhood, this article explores Romania’s regional status and argues that, despite Romania’s aspirations of a higher status in its foreign outlook, externally, the country has so far only displayed a ‘small power’ behaviour. To study Romania’s status, the article investigates both internal and external perceptions of Romania’s capabilities underpinning status by building on data obtained from expert interviews, which were conducted in Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova.
Advancing a new approach to the study of international order, this book highlights the stakes disguised by traditional theoretical languages of power transitions and hegemonic wars. Rather than direct challenges to US military power, the most consequential undermining of hegemony is routine, bottom-up processes of international goods substitution: a slow hollowing out of the existing order through competition to seek or offer alternative sources for economic, military, or social goods. Studying how actors gain access to alternative suppliers of these public goods, this volume shows how states consequently move away from the liberal international order. Examining unfamiliar – but crucial – cases, it takes the reader on a journey from local Faroese politics, to Russian election observers in Central Asia, to South American drug lords. Broadening the debate about the role of public goods in international politics, this book offers a new perspective of one of the key issues of our time.
This paper aims at problematizing this distinction between status quo and revisionist/imperialist states by creating a typology of four kind of states: imperialist, status quo, young and old narcist state. The text will proceed in three sections that: 1) problematises the contemporary realist theorising; 2) reconstructs Morgenthau’s notions of sources of national and political power, ideal types of foreign policy and the character of political community and its interest; 3) presents the four ideal types of states. This typology, based on analyticist metatheory and deeply inspired by Hans Morgenthau’s thought, aims at solving problems with neorealist, and neoclassical realist theorising. Based on such non-positivist metatheory, and thus closer to the classical realist roots, it omits the offensive/defensive neorealist assumption about states motivation. By explicitly combining the three historically bound qualities of states –their sources of national power, extraction capability and foreign policy behaviour it transcends the problems with weak causal linkages between state level variables present in neoclassical realism. Hence, it exemplifies the approach to general theory-building that is practically viable for explicitly exerting normative judgement, also from the perspective non great power state actors – the consistent weakness of mainstream, contemporary realist theorising.
This article argues that secondary states in international hierarchy pursue distinctive strategies to define and secure their identities. When and why do they adopt strategy of socialization and emulation? When and why do they prioritize security of identity even at the expense of physical security? To address these questions, I empirically examine the relationships between Korea and imperial China during the Ming and Qing dynasties. I ask why Chosŏn Korea chose to voluntarily subordinate to the Ming, and why it risked its survival during the period of obvious power transition with the rise of the Qing. I develop a theory of secondary states’ identity-seeking based on social identity theory and ontological security studies. Theoretically, it suggests a new mechanism in which secondary states’ status-seeking generates a lock-in effect through deep socialization. Empirically, it adds to the growing literature on historical East Asian international relations by explicitly theorizing secondary states’ quest for identity.
Just as status generates inequalities between organizations and individuals, it also structures relations among states in the global field. In an effort to elevate their status vis‐à‐vis peers, states pursue a range of status‐seeking strategies. This article asks whether states that invest more heavily in these strategies are rewarded by relevant global audiences and receive tangible material benefits. To examine this question, I study two prominent status displays—bidding to host the Olympic Games and holding a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)—and analyze their relationship with upgrades in sovereign credit ratings. I find that Olympic bidders and UNSC members are 10% more likely to receive a rating upgrade within two years. Further analyses reveal that these rewards disproportionately accrue to “overachievers” who are distinct from the typical members of these elite clubs: large, upper‐middle‐income states for Olympic bidding and small states for the UNSC. To explain these findings, I propose that in a highly uncertain market environment status displays bolster impressions of states' creditworthiness by signaling a commitment to international cooperation and obligations. The study contributes to our understanding of how status shapes global inequalities, and demonstrates that status‐seeking actions yield concrete material rewards.
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