Description
Rising powers from the global South are increasingly challenging the Western-led liberal international order. In this paper, we ask how these rising powers form and perform their roles in the interactions that shape global governance structures. Although the interests and behavior of states in international institutions and negotiations are well documented, existing scholarship has neglected their microfoundations in the formation of national identities. We argue that the identities and self-perceptions of rising powers affect how these actors perceive and perform their role in global governance. As a plausibility probe, we map the distribution of national identities for two rising powers – Brazil and India – and their role perceptions on to their negotiating behavior. We focus on how Brazil and India’s national identities influenced negotiation outcomes at two key moments in the history of international environmental governance: 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement. In doing so, we develop a constructivist account of how transforming national identities constitute rising power role self-perceptions, which in turn allows evaluating both the kinds of strategies and outcomes these actors are more likely to pursue and the kinds of roles they are willing to assume.
