The Grammar of Status Competition

Abstract

Abstract A burgeoning body of research has documented that states of all kinds exert considerable energy and even blood and treasure seeking status on the world stage. Yet, for all scholars’ success in identifying instances of status seeking, they lack agreement on the nature of the international hierarchies states are said to compete within. The difficulty is twofold: international collective beliefs are unobservable, and there are a multitude of plausible ways to assess status in any given policy field or international context. The book addresses these puzzles head on by making a strength out of status’s widely acknowledged slipperiness. The book redirects inquiry away from unobservable international status hierarchies and onto the theories of international status (TIS) that governments and citizens produce and use to make sense of their state’s position in the world. Advancing a new theoretical framework for investigating how TIS inform policymaking, this book showcases its value via three case studies: how rival TIS were instrumental in legitimating (1) Norwegian education reforms at the turn of the 21st century; (2) the U.S. negotiating positions during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and (3) the prosecution of Britain’s war with the Boer between 1899 and 1902. The book thereby provides answers to three major puzzles in international relations status research: why states compete for status when the international rewards seem ephemeral; how states can escape zero-sum competitions for status; and how status scholars can disentangle status from other motivations.