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The importance of concerns about status in world politics has rarely been as evident as it is today. Anxiety about past, present, or future national status is implicated in ongoing Chinese expansion, recent Russian aggression, the rise of American right-wing populism, Great Britain’s impending withdrawal from the European Union, and North Korea’s nuclear proliferation. 1 Deciphering contemporary international politics is impossible without understanding how status dynamics influence the way states are put together and how they interact.
Research on status in international relations has advanced significantly over the past 15 years but remains limited in ways that pose obstacles to the ability of policy makers, scholars, and observers to make sense of the various pathways through which concerns about a state’s position in a hierarchy can influence politics, foreign policy, and international politics. 2 Most frameworks for analyzing status in world politics rely on insights developed by psychologists and social psychologists to explain the attitudes and behavior of individual human beings confronted with inadequate or threatened status. They typically scale these up to develop accounts of state responses to status anxiety or dissatisfaction. This approach to theory-building raises important questions about the validity of the claims that emerge from it. It has also hampered the development of scholarship on status in two ways: by circumscribing the range of explanations that analysts have developed to account for variation in responses to status anxiety and by imposing artificial and unnecessary limits on the kinds of phenomena that status dynamics can be invoked to help explain.
In this article, I propose a revised framework for analyzing the role of status dynamics in world politics. The framework that I develop remains rooted in the same psychological and social psychological insights that are at the core of prominent existing approaches. However, I do not use these to form the basis for a model in which states appear as unitary or anthropomorphic actors. Instead, I develop a framework built to understand differences in the various ways in which individuals can respond to dissatisfaction with or anxiety about the international status of the state with which they identify. This move leads to a substantially more flexible theoretical apparatus, which subsumes insights derived from existing frameworks while...