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Logics of stratified identity management in world politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2019

Steven Ward Open the ORCID record for Steven Ward [Opens in a new window]
Steven Ward*
Affiliation:
Cornell University, 214 White Hall, Ithaca, NY, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: smw347@cornell.edu
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

statusidentitysocial psychology

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Type
Original Papers
Information
International Theory , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 211 - 238
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019. 

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