How small states acquire status: A social network analysis

Abstract

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.

A preliminary study of science diplomacy networks in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe

“…The choice to focus on economic resources is consistent with the acknowledgement by international relations and international political sociology scholarship that diplomatic activities and initiatives are resource-constrained, stating the existence of a positive relation between resources, power, and influence (Hafner-Burton et al, 2009). National economic output as measured by GDP represents a pragmatic choice to begin an exploration of this aspect and to examine whether material resources either affect or are affected by network characteristics, so that international actors can either over-perform (Baxter et al, 2018) or underperform their status (Røren and Beaumont, 2019), or fail to translate their position into influence (Røren, 2020). The application of SNA offers the opportunity to apply these broader insights to SD, adding to our understanding of the collaborations in this field not only as the result of national actors' attributes, but also of their positions and connections in cooperation networks.…”

“…With distant roots in the formal sociology of Georg Simmel and the innovative graphical representations of social relations introduced by Jacob L. Moreno in the 1930s (Erikson, 2013), SNA refers 'to the study of the relationships among actors or nodes that give rise to a corresponding network', aiming 'to measure and accurately represent structural relations, explain why they occur, and examine their consequences' (Baxter et al, 2018: p. 199). In international relations, a network approach expands the focus of analysis from the attributes and material capabilities of political actors to the way in which the 'persistent patterns of relations among agents' in a network can define, enable, and constrain those agents (Hafner-Burton et al, 2009: p. 561), for instance affecting states' international status (Baxter et al, 2018), orienting their diplomatic networks (Kinne, 2014), influencing how they collaborate internationally (Kinne, 2013) and how they share information, beliefs, or norms (Hafner-Burton et al, 2009). Also, international political sociology has used SNA, for instance to analyse transnational networks and their role in policy formation (Bigo, 2016;De Graaff and Van Apeldoorn, 2019;Bernhard, 2011).…”

Fitting South Korea in the United Kingdom's Indo‐Pacific tilt

“…Specifically, how deeply imbedded a state is in a particular group or network is reflective of where the state is ranked hierarchically in terms of status. For example, Baxter et al (2018) apply social network analysis to find that states can increase their status (represented by an increase in centrality) and thereby exercise greater international influence by occupying a more central position in networks. More specifically, status can be broken down into positional and perceptual attributes (Renshon, 2017, pp.…”

China's pursuit of international status through negotiated deference: an empirical analysis of Italy's parliamentary attitude

“…Status is a constitutive component of social life (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) and as such it is widely debated among scholars, including in the IR community (Corbetta et al ., 2013; Paul et al ., 2014; Ward 2017; Zhang, 2017; Duque, 2018; Baxter et al ., 2018; Renshon, 2017; Murray, 2019; Wood and Cox, 2021). Empirical evidence suggests that human beings tend to experience a basic desire for status (Anderson et al ., 2015, 593), to the point that they may strive to acquire material goods not for the security and well-being they procure, but exclusively for their status-enhancing properties (Snidal, 2002).…”