Going for the Gold versus Distributing the Green: Foreign Policy Substitutability and Complementarity in Status Enhancement Strategies

Bezerra, Paul; Cramer, Jacob; Hauser, Megan; Miller, Jennifer; Volgy, Thomas J.

doi:10.1111/fpa.12061

Cited by 15 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…These observations about the role of small states in the international system coincide with the burgeoning literature on the role of status in international politics (Bezerra et al, 2015;Neumann and de Carvalho, 2014;Renshon, 2016;Renshon et al, 2014;Volgy et al, 2013Volgy et al, , 2014Wohlforth, 2014). This new wave of scholarship focuses on how and why states engage in status seeking behavior in addition to and sometimes as opposed to other objectives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

How small states acquire status: A social network analysis

Baxter

Jordan

Rubin

2018

International Area Studies Review

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A number of recent studies have recognized the importance of status in international politics. While this developing scholarship has largely focused on great and middle powers, the pursuit of status by small states remains underexplored. For example, many studies claim that small states such as Qatar ‘punch above their weight’ in international politics in pursuit of status. How do small states without significant military power acquire status? How can we assess change in status over time? This paper argues that small states can acquire status by increasing their involvement in international politics and one way states can do this is through mediation efforts. Acting as a mediator for international conflict can enhance a small state’s status relative to its peers by demonstrating its relevance and importance in the regional and international system. This public act of mediation produces commonly held beliefs that the mediator state is an influential player in the international system, thus conferring it more status. Social network analysis reveals that as a state increases its international engagement through mediation activities, it can occupy a more central position in important networks, and a higher ranking within its peer group, indicating an increase in status. This increase in status can be translated to greater influence in international politics.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

How small states acquire status: A social network analysis

Baxter

Jordan

Rubin

2018

International Area Studies Review

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“…Third, we suggest that regions vary substantially in the level of status its members enjoy in the global community of states [2]. To the extent that status conveys a form of soft power, we propose that the higher the aggregate status of a region, the more likely it will be able to insulate itself from intrusive states outside of the region, and to be able to conduct more cooperative relations with members of other regions.…”

Section: Mgimo Review Of International Relations • 5 • 2018mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Even among the most heavily trading states (the US, Germany, China, and Japan), exports and imports to their immediate region overwhelm their trade relations with the rest of the world 2. This appears to be the case even though most large-N systematic analyses of international political conflicts, for instance, when controlling for meta-regions in their models typically find that region adds a significant control variable in the analysis.…”

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confidence: 98%

Regions in International Politics: a Framework for Integrating Systemic, Regional, Dyadic, and Monadic Approaches

Thomas¹,

Patrick²

2018

MRIR

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The article proposes the framework of further analysis of regional political processes. The authors believe that the significant amount of activities is occurring on the regional level. Thus, the moderate aim of the article is to link different levels of analysis and to present measurable variable to explore regional political developments in this context. The basic assumption of the article is that there are more hierarchical relationships on the regional level than on the global one. Regional powers objective try to create security and stability in their regional areas which increases the overall stability. However, some regions are lacking conditions for durable hierarchy, which is a structural reason for instability and conflicts. The problem the latter regions face is their limited chance of creating durable structures of cooperation, because hierarchy implies some structural violence that helps to realize interests and understand policy limitations. The article presents comparative framework that assesses features of regional powers such as strength or weakness, absence of rivals or their presence. The framework also includes state's policies that may disregard the regional context in order to seek more promising opportunities. The "hierarchy and interest"-based analysis demonstrates that some regions have strong spatial appearance while the others are only in search of their spatial identity. This allows elaborating on the dependent variables such as territorial disputes, cooperation of rivals, political regime performance. The authors conclude that the presented framework can be useful for further analysis and enriches potential for testing hypotheses of regional political behavior of state actors.

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“…4 Among these, eleven (40.7 percent) adopt or endorse the central elements and claims of Larson and Shevchenko's framework. Some mostly accept or apply the framework (Malinova 2014;Miller et al 2015;Bezerra et al 2015;Evans 2015;Larson and Shevchenko 2014b;Lee 2016); others combine elements of the framework with other theoretical propositions or endorse its conceptual distinctions and causal claims as established wisdom in the study of status in IR (Forsberg, Heller, and Wolf 2014;Clunan 2014;Wolf 2014a;Heimann 2015;Freedman 2016).…”

Section: Status and Social Identity In World Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another way to understand the influence of Larson and Shevchenko's framework is to limit attention to work that applies SIT. Of the twenty-seven articles about status in international relations that have appeared since the beginning of 2014, eight explicitly use SIT as their primary explanatory framework (Larson and Shevchenko 2014b;Clunan 2014;Malinova 2014;Miller et al 2015;Bezerra et al 2015;Evans 2015;Sambanis et al 2015;Lee 2016); two consider but reject it as an explanatory framework (Renshon 2016;Barnhart 2016). Of the eight pieces that adopt SIT, seven use the Larson and Shevchenko 3 On the significance of status for Chinese foreign policy, see Deng (2008) and Wolf (2014a); on Russian foreign policy, see Clunan (2009Clunan ( , 2014, Forsberg (2014), Heller (2014), Malinova (2014), and Tsygankov (2012 translation.…”

Section: Status and Social Identity In World Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost in Translation: Social Identity Theory and the Study of Status in World Politics

Ward

2017

International Studies Quarterly

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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.

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Going for the Gold versus Distributing the Green: Foreign Policy Substitutability and Complementarity in Status Enhancement Strategies

Cited by 15 publications

References 34 publications

How small states acquire status: A social network analysis

How small states acquire status: A social network analysis

Regions in International Politics: a Framework for Integrating Systemic, Regional, Dyadic, and Monadic Approaches

Lost in Translation: Social Identity Theory and the Study of Status in World Politics

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