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Unimensional accounts of revisionism – those that align states along a single continuum from supporting the status quo to seeking a complete overhaul of the international system – miss important variation between a desire to alter the balance of military power and a desire to alter other elements of international order. We propose a two-dimensional property space that generates four ideal types: status-quo actors, who are satisfied with both order and the distribution of power; reformist actors, who are fine with the current distribution of power but seek to change elements of order; positionalist actors, who see no reason to alter the international order but do aim to shift the distribution of power; and revolutionary actors, who want to overturn both international order and the distribution of capabilities. This framework helps make sense of a number of important debates about hegemony and international order, such as the possibility of revisionist hegemonic powers, controversies over the concept of ‘soft balancing’, and broader dynamics of international goods substitution during power transitions.

Chinese and Russian foreign policy, in part, reflects both countries' ambitions for higher status in the international system. This implies a critical question: can accommodating these ambitions prevent, or even reverse, the turn toward geopolitically competitive grand strategies by Moscow and Beijing? In other words, might accommodation lead them to channel their efforts in more benign directions? The dominant framework for analyzing the ways in which states seek status-a framework rooted in the insights of Social Identity Theory (SIT)-suggests that the answer is yes: status-seekers will most likely turn toward geopolitically competitive strategies when they face apparently "impermeable" obstacles to their ambitions. I argue that this framework depends on a "mistranslation" of SIT. Properly translated, the theory tells us little about the consequences of persistent status denial for international politics. Instead, it implies that status-seeking will resolve into geopolitical competition when, first, participants view geopolitically significant resources as markers of status and, second, when leaders believe that they can successfully change the distribution of status. I use analyses of two prominent cases that should prove friendly ground for the conventional translation of SIT-Germany before World War I and Imperial Japan-to demonstrate the serious problems that plague the framework favored by international relations scholars, especially with respect to its central claim about the link between persistent status denial and geopolitical competition.

The importance of concerns about status in world politics has rarely been as evident as it is today. Yet our understanding of how status dynamics influence politics and foreign policy remains limited. Dominant approaches draw on insights from social psychology about individual attitudes and behavior, but scale these up to build accounts of states as unitary or anthropomorphic actors. This results in serious theoretical problems and analytical blind spots. In this article, I offer a new framework – still rooted in social psychological insights about intergroup status dynamics – that addresses these problems. I recast the fundamental question from one about how states react to status dissatisfaction to one about how individuals – with different psychological profiles, different interests, and different positions within the national community – react to anxiety about the status of the state with they identify. I develop four broad logics that inform responses to national status dissatisfaction: identification change, emulation, transformation, and rejection. These logics subsume familiar arguments about how states seek status, but they also accommodate additional variation and explanatory possibilities. They thus constitute a more flexible framework that is better suited than existing alternatives to understand the full variety of ways in which status dynamics may influence world politics.