Description
How does status dissatisfaction shape actor’s behavior in an international society? Existing scholarships—those that focus mainly on actors’ frustration about their standing on hierarchical structure in upward social comparison—risk reducing status into a function of materialist attributes that concerns mainly the major powers. This article proposes to replace this substantialist lens with a relational one. Applying a Weberian conception of status as a social process of actors effectively claiming social prestige, I identify two types of status audiences during this process: those superiorly positioned and those inferiorly positioned. Focusing on two sources of status attribution—recognition from above and deference from below—I discover four ideal status scenarios, one pleasing and three dissatisfactory: systematic respect (high recognition and high deference); unfair treatment (low recognition and high deference); bottom-up provocation (high recognition and low deference); systematic exclusion (low recognition and low deference). This multiple audience status dynamic is tested in China’s shifting response to the emerging global environmental regime from 1950 to 1972. Empirically, this is the first article to my knowledge to utilize multinational-multilingual archival records to reconstruct China’s process-level performance of environmental treaty negotiations in particular and the oft-masked global south in international governance in general.
Key words:
Status; Relational IR; China; Stratification; Status Dissatisfaction
