Status symbols in world politics

Abstract

A large body of scholarship in International Relations (IRs) has shown that numerous actors in world politics are avid observers, and sometimes obsessive seekers of social status. However, the literature has remained oddly quiet about the status symbols acquired and used to further that goal. To redress this lacuna, this special issue brings together several of IR’s leading status scholars to investigate the emergence, decline, ambiguity, functionality, and utility of status symbols in world politics. This introduction lays out the analytical and ethical warrant for studying status symbols. We formulate an interpretive framework for historicizing status symbols and exploring their temporal and spatial trajectories within international society. Specifically, this introduction develops four analytical lenses for illuminating status symbols. In short, how status symbols temporally rise to prominence and eventually whiter, how and whether they function and thus how they are received, whether their inherent multivocality enable them to cut across multiple groups of world politics, and how and to what extent status symbols can be consciously manipulated into a force for good.

About this article

This article is part of the special issue “Status symbols in World Politics”, which was accepted on 06 February 2023 by the previous editorial team of Cooperation and Conflict, with Annika Björkdahl as Editor in Chief. The article was submitted to the journal on 28 April 2023, before the tenure of the current editorial team began (01 June 2023). To avoid conflicts of interest, all editorial decisions relating to this special issue have been handled by the former Editor in Chief.

Introduction

What do opera theaters, the Olympics, high numbers of Facebook followers, and aircraft carriers have in common? They have all served as status symbols whose possession have at one time or place symbolized high standing among actors in the international sphere. Indeed, scholarship in International Relations (IRs) has shown that actors of all sorts in world politics, most notably countries and their representatives, are avid observers, and sometimes obsessive players of international status games. A wealth of research now documents how all states, great and small, rising and declining, care sufficiently about the status that they sometimes exert considerable energy and even blood and treasure chasing it (Barnhart, 2020; Dafoe et al., 2014; Deng, 2008; Goh, 2013; Larson and Shevchenko, 2010; Murray, 2018; Renshon, 2017; Wohlforth et al., 2017). Focusing on cases that make little sense from economic or security perspectives, status research has thus developed explanations of war (Lebow, 2010; Renshon, 2017; Ward, 2013, 2017; Wohlforth, 2009), arms acquisition (Eyre and Suchman, 1996; Græger, 2015; Schweller and Pu, 2014), humanitarian aid (Crandall and Varov, 2016; Gilady, 2018), imperialism (Barnhart, 2016, 2020), and even Brexiting (Freedman, 2020). In short, this research agenda has made strides in the last decade moving status from the shadows and footnotes of IR and become one of the field’s most progressive and dynamic research agendas (Dafoe et al., 2014; Götz, 2021; MacDonald and Parent, 2021).

However, this strand of research has remained oddly quiet about status symbols. With only a handful of exceptions (Murray, 2010; Naylor, 2018; O’Neill, 2006; Pouliot, 2014; Pu, 2017; Schweller and Pu, 2014), status symbols feature in the analysis of status-seeking, but they operate as a fixed context to which states respond; recognized to be variable but not studied as such (Zarakol, 2017: 7). Lilach Gilady’s (2018) the Price of Prestige offered the first—and up until now, the only—systematic book-length treatment of status symbols in world politics. ¹ Gilady develops a sophisticated analytical framework based on Thorstein Veblen’s insight that consumption is seldom about only satisfying one’s internal needs (primary utility) but also a signal to society about one’s capabilities and social place (symbolic utility). Via case studies of big science, aircraft carriers, and development aid, Gilady shows how conspicuous consumption manifests in the high politics of defense procurement and middle power do-goodery. However, it is beyond any monograph to cover all aspects of status symbols. Indeed, as Gilady (2018: 172) suggests, her work aims to serve as a “stepping stone” to further scholarship on status symbols. Picking up Gilady’s cue, this special issue builds on her ground-breaking work and answers her call for a closer study of status symbols in world politics (Gilady, 2018: 172; also see Pouliot, 2014; Schweller and Pu, 2014).

What, then, is the significance of status symbols for how world politics operate? And why do we need a special issue dedicated to exploring them? In short, we believe that furthering our understanding of status symbols is not an esoteric concern but crucial to shedding light on how the international order (dis)functions. Here, we define status symbols as things, attributes, rights, privileges, or behavior—that actors acquire, embody, or practice that signal or constitute their social status within a particular social context. ² The value of such status symbols cannot be reduced to symbolic utility—a Ferrari will get you from to A to B after all—but nor can their functions, effects, and prevalence be fully understood without recognizing their association with social status. Status symbols are key to signaling higher positional status or to enter certain “status clubs.” Crucially, without a shared intersubjective notion of what practices, things, or behaviors symbolize and sometimes grant higher status, status-seeking would become a crapshoot and both pointless to pursue and even less sensible to study. Yet for all the inconsistent practices of recognition in IRs, the pursuit of status is not random; while one cannot draw a perfectly straight line between status symbols and high status, the line is sufficiently visible for actors to seek them in regular if not linear fashion (see Gilady, 2018; Renshon, 2016). Status symbols thus regulate the games of status played between actors in world politics. Given the strong baseline documenting the prevalence of status-seeking across all kinds of states, the status symbols that structure international status competitions warrant further sustained attention.

We will expand on and defend our definition below, but at this point suffices to note that it is consciously broad because the universe of international status symbols is only limited by the processes of social construction and human ingenuity: it is difficult to deny that both opera houses and nuclear weapons are international status symbols. It would thus be unwise to set forth a research agenda that excluded one or another a-priori. They may work through differing mechanisms and draw on different discourses but that is an avenue for research to explore not a question of definition. Indeed, the challenge is to develop the theoretical apparatus that can cope and make sense of the diversity of status symbols, which is what the rest of this special issue will set about doing.

To pursue these lines of inquiry, this special issue invited leading status researchers to put status symbols front and center and explore how they emerge, wither, function, disfunction, change, stabilize, and thereby deepen IR’s understanding of their role in world politics. To facilitate exploration of complexity but also generate coherence, we developed a broad definition and interpretive framework (explained below) and asked them to circle their inquiries around one or more of four analytical lenses that by utilising promise to advance IR status research:

• 1. Temporality—how and why do status symbols endure or change over time?

• 2. Functionality—how and why do status symbols work to raise or maintain status and equally why do they fail to work as intended?

• 3. Multivocality—how and why the function and effects of status symbols vary across contexts?

• 4. Manipulability—to what extent and how can the symbolic value of status symbols be consciously managed and altered?

The remainder of this introduction article proceeds in five sections. First, we take stock of the status-seeking literature and argue why a focus on status symbols is warranted. Second, we discuss the difficulties and opportunities of transferring key sociological theories of status symbols to IR and how we might best deal analytically with these issues. Third, starting from the limitations found in the status literature, we expand on and provide a broader justification for our contributors’ focus on the temporality, multivocality, manipulability, and functionality of status symbols. Fourth, we develop an interpretative approach to status symbols and justify the analytical and methodological choice to foreground status symbols and bracket actors’ motivations for attaining these symbols. Fifth, we provide an outline of the articles in this special issue by detailing their contributions and discussing how they fit within the broader theme of this introduction. We conclude by elaborating how the special issue taken as a whole complements and challenges existing status research.

Status-seeking and status symbols

The first wave of research on status and prestige that emerged during the early 2000s centered particularly on status as a motivation and explanation for a wide variety of behaviors (Larson et al., 2014; Larson and Shevchenko, 2003, 2014a; Lebow, 2008; Wohlforth, 2009). Painting in broad strokes, the literature identifies three drivers of status-seeking: intrinsic, instrumental, and domestic-legitimacy rewards of status. First, research grounded in psychology and sometimes biology contend that humans have an “intrinsic stake into how their group, hence their state fares in relation to other groups” (Onea, 2017: 129; also see Greve and Levy, 2018: 155; Prosser, 2017: 28). Actors thus seek status on behalf of themselves and the corporate actors they represent because they consider it to be a “good-in-itself” (Larson et al., 2014: 17; Larson and Shevchenko, 2010, 2014b). Second, deriving from classical realist thought, a major strand of status research emphasizes instrumental rewards associated with holding a recognized position in a hierarchy (Gilpin, 1981: 31–32; Markey, 1999; Morgenthau, 1985: 87, 94–96). Here, status is seen a “means-to-an end” where higher status give actors more power, influence, and an increased likelihood that others will defer to their wishes (Dafoe et al., 2014: 373; Larson et al., 2014: 7–8; Mercer, 2017: 136–137; Renshon, 2017: 33). Third, states seek status because it generates favorable effects in the domestic arena, such as national pride, political support, and loyalty to the in-group (Clunan, 2014a; Schulz and Thies, 2024; Ward, 2017, 2020b).

The focus on motivations for status has proved to be a valuable and effective angle for the field of research. Exploring the consequences of status motivations shed much needed light on a broad array of foreign policies that are inadequately explained by conventional rationalist motivations and theories. Once researchers began looking, they would find that status-seeking appeared omnipresent, even in ostensibly hard cases, such as defense and military planning, where hyperrational self-help logic is so often presumed to dominate. Indeed, one of the major successes of this first wave of status research has been to show that status is a significant driver of arms races, imperialism, and even great power wars. Thus, the focus on motivations was clearly successful in establishing that “status matters,” and that the pursuit of prestige could (sometimes) trump concerns over a state’s security, well-being, and wealth. In turn, the success of this “first wave” has beget a second wave of status research that has begun to develop, nuance, and often question the pioneering works of the first wave (Beaumont, 2024: 9). Thus, over the course of the last decade, status has transformed from an explanation of last resort to a vibrant and progressive research agenda, making “great strides in addressing fundamental dynamics in international politics” (Macdonald and Parent, 2021: 360). Notably, even status skeptics, such as Jonathan Mercer (2017), who suggest status-seeking is driven by a psychological “illusion”, do not question its prevalence and significance in world politics. As such, status has become a welcome addition to the field of IR in providing convincing explanations for understudied or misunderstood cases or phenomena.

However, the focus demonstrating that status motivations drive a great deal of world politics, led status scholars to often bracket the reasons why and for whom the actions and goals of status-seeking actors in world politics are considered prestigious in the first place. Larson and Shevchenko’s (2003, 2010, 2014a, 2014b, 2019) influential (Ward, 2020b: 822) IR translation of Social Identity Theory (SIT) in research on status exemplifies this tendency well. In short, the theory argues states strive to achieve and maintain a positive social identity through what they call “social competition,” “social mobility,” and “social creativity.” The framework offers a valuable framework for identifying the motive for status, and for conceptualizing and differentiating between the agentic strategies that states use. Yet, SIT offers far less analytical purchase on the other side of the coin: the social structure—hierarchy—within which states seek status. For instance, SIT’s notion of mobility and competition explicitly takes the substance of the existing hierarchy as a given and thus tells us little about how, for example, warfighting, acquiring nuclear weapons, and establishing new international organizations become meaningful status symbols for competition and mobility. While SIT theory assumes under the strategy of social creativity that states may be able to change the rules of the status hierarchy, its analytical focus is on identifying this status-seeking strategy rather than exploring whether it succeeds in changing the hierarchy.

Moreover, it seems unlikely that all status symbols and hierarchies result from agentic, status motivated, strategies to change the nature of the hierarchy. It is reasonable to assume that at least some hierarchy-producing events and processes occur as by-products of actions undertaken for very different reasons and beyond the immediate control of the states involved (see Wohlforth, 2024). Clearly SIT’s social creativity offers a useful account of how some practices may become status symbols, but it is far from exhaustive. We single out SIT here because it is not only influential but also it is illustrative of general tendency: the pathbreaking works of status literature, and the bulk of the literature that follows, have largely focused on identifying and theorizing state’s status-seeking strategies and undertheorized the rules of the status game and their co-constitutive status symbols (see similar critique in Beaumont, 2024: 7–8; Müller et al., 2024; Røren, 2024; Zarakol, 2017: 12). Hence, our intention for this special issue is not to replace or improve on the sophisticated theoretical and methodological tools that were developed to isolate motivations and status-seeking strategies. Rather, by bracketing motivations, and instead focusing on the status symbols themselves, we aim to create a productive complementary line of status research in which our goal is to get closer to an understanding of the rules and order of the international status game and how they change and vary across time and space (see also Rumelili and Towns, 2022).

Why do we need an IR take on status symbols?

The concrete analytical advantages of zooming in on status symbols rather than motivations will be expanded on later in this article. If one for now, however, accepts that status symbols are widely sought in world politics and provide an understanding of how the rules and order of the status game are played, skeptics might still reasonably ask whether this special issue risks reinventing a wheel that sociologists long ago developed. Indeed, sociological forebearers provide useful eclectic toolkits for making sense of international status symbols. From Thorstein Veblen (1901) on the symbolic value of “conspicuous consumption,” Erving Goffman (1951, 1963) on stigmatizing processes and symbols of class status, to Bourdieu (1984) on the role cultural distinctions play in social reproduction, and Norbert Elias (1978) on the “civilizing process,” we do not lack concepts to think with. Indeed, to make sense of international status, this special issue draws on the wealth of work undertaken over the last century by sociologists (e.g. Freistein and Müller, 2024). However, there are also theoretical grounds to believe that sociology’s theories of status symbols cannot just be used “off-the-peg.” One of which is that there may be significant differences when it comes to how status symbols work for collectives (like states) compared to how they work for individuals (Abizadeh, 2005: 58; Beaumont, 2024: 12).

First of all, when embarking on the study of “international” status symbols, specific conceptual and empirical challenges emerge regarding agency, agents, and the ontological “problem of the state” that has long bedeviled IR (Holm and Sending, 2018; Jackson, 2004; Ringmar, 1996). Take embassies and ambassadors as an example. How an embassy looks conveys standing, both for the ambassadors and the polities they represent. During the emergence of the resident ambassador, it was important to establish embassies “in a prestigious location and in a mansion worthy of the status of its occupant, and an increasing dependency on furniture, material trappings, and interior decoration to help create a set of surroundings appropriate to the king’s representative.”(Jacobsen, 2012: 39–40; also see Glendinning, 2004; Neumann, 2018). However, while location and decoration were, and still are, important for conveying status, it is unclear for whom status is being sought and for whom the attribution of status should be directed. Is it the ambassador who seeks and receives status? The diplomatic mission? The polity which the ambassador and the diplomatic staff represent? Or is status sought and attributed to all the actors above? Theories designed for understanding status symbols’ role for individuals within a society offer less answers to such questions of abstraction and (re)presentation that abound in world politics.

While a tentative answer to the question of state agency is to imagine nation states are like people who “possess” attributes and symbols and act on “interests,” we should not forget it requires a considerable and complicated discursive labor to imagine states and other corporate actors interacting across space and time (Anderson, 1983; Campbell, 1992; Ringmar, 1996; Lerner, 2021). States do not interact like people. Thus, contra a person who acquires a Ferrari, states cannot sit next to their new battleship, only their representatives can. Similarly, while individuals physically interact with those they wish to impress, only representatives of states can physically interact. It is only via an institutionalized process of narration by government bureaucracies and third parties that states “interactions” become materialized. We suspect that something significant occurs during these processes of narrating the state and its symbols into the world that warrant special theoretical attention. For instance, the possibility for multivocality of status symbols: that they embody different meanings in different places simultaneously,—either by intent or accident—is qualitatively different among states than people. Equally, this may well open the door for more (mis)understandings about the intent or meaning of status symbols. Put simply, given the physical and discursive distance between the members of different collectives, we expect international status symbols to travel in ways quite unintended by their possessor (see Leira and de Carvalho, 2024).

Moreover, while individuals might need to legitimate their acquisition of status symbols, corporate actors in world politics must provide a reasoning for their acquisition (Krebs, 2015: 813). Indeed, the domestic politics of status symbols—how governments use status symbols for legitimation and whether and how this is contested (see Beaumont et al., 2024) is the type of research question that sits in tension with sociological theories designed to make sense of how individuals acquire status symbols. Finally, sociological theories of status tend to propose critical analyses of class and inequality among domestic groups. For instance, Veblen’s work is saturated with contempt for the social order he analyzes and has more than a hint of revolutionary spirit (Banta, 2007). While some of this critical spirit can be translated into analyses of international status symbols, few would suggest that international society’s hierarchies and domestic class structures map perfectly onto one another. It would thus prove wise to reflect before trying to transpose critical theories designed for the latter onto the former. Ultimately, the extent to which states’ status symbols (dis)function differently in IRs vis-à-vis individuals within a community remains an open question and for research to explore.

Analytical lenses for understanding international status symbols

Aiming to catalyze a sustained conversation about status symbols distinctive for the discipline of IR, we now outline four analytical lenses that we believe provide a useful starting point for analyses and that simultaneously address limitations found in the broader status literature in IR: the temporality, functionality, multivocality, and manipulability of status symbols in world politics. Following this section, we outline how an explicitly interpretative approach is well suited to exploring these lines of inquiry and then discuss how the articles to this special issue pick up these themes and contribute to advancing the broader status research agenda.

• (1) Temporality: Why and how do status symbols emerge and wither in salience?

We know that world politics is littered with objects and activities associated with high status. Some of these items and activities have become so reified that it nearly becomes unthinkable to even question their rise and eventual demise. A classic example is here how military capabilities—tanks, guns, expenditures, and nuclear weapons—are often treated as universally recognized attributes that generate status, in particular, for those in the upper echelons of world politics (Hironaka, 2017; Renshon, 2016, 2017). Yet, no symbol retains its meaning forever. For example, nuclear weapons have long been a recognized mechanism—albeit not a sufficient one—for signaling great power or superpower status (Gilady, 2018; Haynes, 2018; O’Neill, 2001). Its inherent destructive force combined with the difficulty and cost of acquiring it, makes nuclear weapons appear a natural status symbol in world politics (O’Neill, 2006). However, this story is at best incomplete. The technological capability to build nuclear weapons is widespread yet numerous countries have proudly refrained from doing so (Hymans, 2006; Pelopidas, 2015) Further, much of the difficulty involved in acquiring nuclear weapons today stems from the various legal regimes monitoring supply and use of atomic materials and the looming threat of sanctions rather than from the inherent technical challenge. Moreover, nuclear weapons’ status value is far from universal; the same weapons can symbolize great powerhood or pariah status, depending on when the weapons were first acquired. Indeed, the Non-Proliferation Treaty appears to have helped stigmatize new nuclear weapon states, while functioning to maintain the status value for older nuclear weapons states (Egeland, 2025: 222; Sagan, 1996: 76–8; Panico, 2022). However, even here, the specific narratives that underpin nuclear weapons’ symbolic value have changed over time: where the United Kingdom once boasted of its nuclear weapons’ destructive power; in the 2000s, it used its relatively small arsenal to claim it was the ideal state to lead nuclear disarmament (Beaumont, 2021). Moreover, weapons with similar intrinsic destructive qualities, chemical, and biological weapons have never become status symbols (Price, 1995).

These temporally contextual rules and norms governing the status recognition are rarely fleshed out in the literature on status in IR (Naylor, 2018: 2). Despite status symbols’ necessary centrality to all status research, we know little about how particular international status symbols emerged and why they withered, nor how their effects travel through time. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that the status associated with a particular symbol originates not only from their material qualities but also from the social fabrics that give these things, behavior, or practices meaning (see Mälksoo, 2024). As Pouliot (2014: 192) suggested in an early precursor to this special issue, “practical notions of status evolve over time and space” which in turn means that competition for it is “not only about how much status one country has, but also about what status is in the first place.” However, the process of which this change happens, and the distinct histories by which status symbols’ meaning evolves—be it turning something into a status symbol, maintaining it as such, or transforming from a symbol of pride into a white elephant project (Beaumont et al., 2024; Hisarlıoğlu and Yanık, 2024; Leira and de Carvalho, 2024)—remains severely understudied.

• (2) Functionality: What are the effects of acquiring, embodying, or practicing particular status symbols?

While the general status literature in IR has exhaustively demonstrated that all kinds of actors in world politics seek status, it is only recently that scholars have explored whether, why, and the extent to which that status-seeking is recognized by other actors (Buarque, 2023). We believe that an explicit focus on status symbols provides an opportunity to explore the varying and perhaps unintended effects of acquiring or performing them. In the stories that are normally told, status symbols are the mechanism to gain higher status. However, whether they actually do so is too often merely assumed (Mercer, 2017). Yet, we have good reasons to believe that status symbols may often not work, or at least not as intended. For instance, we learn from the work by Gilady (2018: 89–90) that Thailand acquired an aircraft carrier because of its symbolic value. Yet, she also notes that it was left to decay in the dock. This begs the question that Gilady glosses over: did it work? If so, where? It certainly did not impress Gilady, so we might assume that its effects are at least patchy (see Wohlforth, 2024). Existing scholarship has limited answers to this question nor has it attempted to empirically or theorize when a status symbol will succeed or flop. Hence, Macdonald and Parent’s (2021) recent review suggests that status scholars have yet to show that status is not merely a “chimera.” Our view is that assuming that status symbols just “work” as intended seems untenable: surely they do not work everywhere. However, we are equally skeptical that international status is merely an “illusion” (e.g. Mercer, 2017). More likely, scholars lack the methods to apprehend how status and status symbols diffuse and produce irregular effects (Freedman, 2016). We think that contextualized attention to audiences’ responses to the acquisition and maintenance of status symbols, particularly variance across audiences, is key to understanding the broader question of whether, why, and how status-seeking works. A necessary corollary to this approach is that scholars should pay closer attention to failed or embarrassing status symbols.

Indeed, as Beaumont et al. (2024) illustrate in their contribution to this special issue, even successfully acquiring a status symbol can backfire among some domestic audiences. Lest we forget, labeling something as driven by status or prestige has a distinctly pejorative meaning in everyday life and politics: calling something a status symbol is often equivalent to calling out someone vain and superficial. Yet, until now, status scholarship has been oddly quiet on the risks of status-seeking backfiring. This is curious because status-seeking and status symbols are often identified and defined—perhaps most famously and contemptuously by Veblen—as necessarily involving ostentatious waste and performative pointlessness (Veblen, 1901). Thus, if a status scholar can spot their wastefulness, then surely it follows that domestic audiences can too and may well object.

• (3) Multivocality: where do status symbols work and how do their effect vary across contexts?

A strong focus on identifying status motivations and sometimes attempting to measure general level of recognition has led status scholars to bracket the multiplicity of meanings that a status symbol can engender. Here, a significant and growing strand of status research has attempted to develop a unified general measure of status over time (Duque, 2018; Renshon, 2017; Røren and Beaumont, 2019; Røren and Wivel, 2023). Yet, what these approaches elide or abstract away is the multiplicity of meaning and responses that a status symbol may convey and embody. In practice, acquiring a status symbol often produces a messy and sometimes conflicting set of effects. This is because acquiring status symbols involves signaling which in turn is interpreted by multiple audiences with different expectations and preferences (Schweller and Pu, 2014: 145–146).

Two aspects of multivocality are particularly pressing. First, whether it is battleships, development aid, or EU membership, what generates status depends on the rules of the given status order within which the actor operates (Naylor, 2018; Røren, 2023, 2024; Wohlforth et al., 2017). As such, status symbols are multivocal vehicles that can be interpreted from multiple perspectives simultaneously and used for multiple purposes (Padgett and Ansell, 1993: 1263; Pu, 2019; Røren, 2023; See also Schweller and Pu, 2014; Suzuki, 2017). For example, as Røren (2023: 19) argues, Canada rose in NATO’s status hierarchy when it allowed the United States to deploy nuclear weapons using its aircrafts, but for the same reason, its status among non-aligned countries dropped. Similarly, when the norms on nuclear proliferation materialized in the 1960s, Sweden abandoned its aspirations to join the nuclear weapons club to remain in the middle power club (Røren, 2023: 19). Indeed, acquiring nukes, spending money on the military, and purchasing tanks may very well not be the most viable path to status for all actors in world politics. As established in the literature, many small and middle powers shy away from military ways of achieving status and instead focus on conflict mediation, humanitarian aid and assistance, multilateralism, and system maintenance, to gain recognition (Crandall and Varov, 2016; de Carvalho and Lie, 2015; Neumann, 2011; Røren, 2019; Wohlforth et al., 2017). Thus, the kind of practices, things, and behaviors that are by some group of actors (e.g. major powers) considered to be status symbols, are irrelevant, or even harmful to other actors’ (e.g. small powers) social status. As such, instead of asking the question of whether acquiring, wielding, or practicing a status symbol either increased or decreased an actor’s social status, we might instead ask a multivocal question: Where did the status symbol lead to a change in status, and why did those shifts happen in those particular clubs or groups? (Røren, 2023: 20).

Second, the successful performance or acquisition of status symbols could also produce important domestic effects, such as political mobilization and legislative change (Schulz and Thies, 2024; Schweller and Pu, 2014; Ward, 2017). Moreover, polities and their citizens can gain pride and legitimacy from acquiring a status symbol even without international recognition being forthcoming (Beaumont, 2024; also see Hisarlıoğlu and Yanık, 2024). We contend that attention to audiences’ responses to the acquisition and maintenance of status symbols—particularly by identifying and making sense of differences across audiences over time—is key to understanding the broader question of whether, why, and how status-seeking works. In sum, by centering this special issue analytically on status symbols, we aim to show that symbolic effects associated with these things, practices, and behaviors encompass complex international and domestic ramifications as well as subjective and intersubjective interpretations that are inadequately captured by unidimensional accounts of international recognition.

• (4) Manipulability: Can status symbols be a force for good?

From empires to nuclear weapons, the international abounds with activities and objects that policymakers and publics alike would, at least in retrospect, rather be stigmatized than valorized (Hobson and Sharman, 2005; Sagan, 1996; Schweller and Pu, 2014). While much of the literature tend to treat status symbols as static social structures that are not prone to change, in theory, it should be not beyond the wit of man to influence some of these processes. Indeed, given that status symbols are social constructs, we believe it makes sense to explore how governments and citizens might encourage or even engineer better and more prosocial status symbols. While some scholars have suggested that certain activities are intrinsically difficult and therefore natural status symbols (Renshon, 2016), these are also qualities that can be constructed, amplified, or perhaps mitigated (Clunan, 2014b). For example, one of the most prominent status symbols out there, diamonds, seemingly hold key attributes for them to be classified as naturally exclusive: they are beautiful and rare. And because of their beauty and scarcity, they are expensive. This combination makes diamonds a natural status symbol. However, in fact, while diamonds are rare, other gemstones are rarer. Moreover, for the untrained eye, a rough diamond might look like any other shiny rock. The construction of diamonds as status symbol results instead from a near-monopoly controlling the extraction and supply of diamonds, combined with a billion dollar marketing strategy of attaching diamonds to natural beauty and exclusivity, which in turn has made it a sign of love and commitment (Epstein, 1982; Proctor, 2001). Thus, even the most prominent and often thought of as the most naturally occurring status symbol, depends on engineering to become a prestigious item.

Just like diamonds, the prestige attached to status symbols in world politics is influenced by social interactions. For instance, nuclear weapons may well be difficult to produce, but it would be quite possible for producer countries to give them away as aid and thus reduce their exclusivity. Meanwhile, it is at least as difficult now to maintain and administer and empire as it was in the 19th century, yet international society has successfully stigmatized this behavior, despite its apparent intrinsic suitability as a status symbol (Hobson and Sharman, 2005). Moreover, the symbolic value of prosocial behaviors can also be amplified. Indeed, in domestic society, awards are routinely created and status handed out that encourage prosocial behaviors. For instance, what is the Nobel Prize but an attempt to construct a symbolically important status position for scientists, writers, and activists (Johnsen, 2015)?

Not only do we think it is possible for international society to do likewise but it also appears it is already doing so. Indeed, the explosion of international rankings over the last decade (Cooley and Snyder, 2015; Kelley and Simmons, 2015) appears to be a conscious attempt to turn state activities that Veblen might have called “drudgery” into “exploits” warranting acclaim. Status symbols usually need to be conspicuous, difficult, costly, and exclusive (Gilady, 2018; O’Neill, 2001, 2006). Before international rankings burgeoned in the 1990s, performance in public policy areas, such as education, health care, and gender equality, just to name a few, could not meet this demand for conspicuousness and would made poor status symbols. However, as the work by Beaumont (2024: 131) notes, international rankings, by design “make performance conspicuous and accentuate the scarcity and difficulty of achieving good performance,” thus generating symbolic utility for activities hitherto seen as mundane state practices. While we should be careful to remain alert to the use of rankings in world politics given their many pathologies (Beaumont and Towns, 2021), we argue there need not be an inherent contradiction in status-seeking and, as a by-product, making the world a better place. As Gilady (2018: 91) suggests in her discussion of prosocial behavior and status symbols: “If prosociality can generate prestige, the tension between self-help and other-help is resolved.” As such, learning more about the processes and mechanisms through which status symbols emerge promises to facilitate contesting normatively undesirable symbols and encouraging more prosocial status symbols to stand in their stead (see Freistein and Müller, 2024; Hadjiathanasiou, 2024).

An interpretative approach: foregrounding status symbols; bracketing motivations

As can be read from our analytical lenses, status symbols only function as status symbols for as long as actors in specific social contexts give them symbolic value and associate their possession with higher status. We thus take an interpretivist starting point: status symbols must be recognizable, meaningful, and empirically identifiable as status symbols within a given social context by the people involved. Our interpretivist gambit about status symbols suggests that any items or behaviors could become prestigious because if are represented and reproduced as such by the relevant international actors’ discourses and practices about them. We thus take seriously the claim from emerging works that status symbols are only given meaning once actors talk about or engage with them in a way that discursively links them to some kind of social hierarchy (Beaumont, 2024; Naylor, 2018; Røren, 2023; Schulz and Thies, 2024; Viola, 2020). To paraphrase the work by Zarakol (2017: 8), social actors derive their status from “historically contingent knowledge structures” that “mark them as superior or inferior.” It is these contextual “knowledge structures” of status symbols which we seek to unpack and explore in this special issue.

While the idea that status symbols depend on intersubjective interpretations might seem self-evident, the longest standing status research agenda uses proxies for status that have no real-world symbolic value. For instance, the status discrepancy scholarship bases its approach on ranking countries in terms of number of diplomatic embassies and comparing this to rank in the scholar’s assessment of material power (Galtung, 1964; Renshon, 2016; Røren and Beaumont, 2019; Røren and Wivel, 2023; Volgy et al., 2011). Differences between these rankings are then correlated with specific foreign policy outcomes (usually war) (Galtung, 1964; Renshon, 2017). While the actual practice of receiving and maintaining an embassy is a meaningful status symbol, the ranking (produced by status discrepancy scholars) of the number of embassies is not (MacDonald and Parent, 2021: 367; also see Ward, 2020a). To be sure, the proxy has proven epistemologically useful to status scholars, ³ but it is not ontologically meaningful for politicians, practitioners, or citizens. In other words, it may aid generalization but at the expense of contextualization and understanding.

Our interpretivist approach also brackets the question of whether a decision was motivated by status. Recalling our definition of status symbols as things, attributes, rights, privileges, or behavior that actors acquire, embody, or practice that signal or constitute their social status within a particular social context. It bears emphasis, that what makes a status symbol is not the intent or motivation behind acquiring it, but whether or not it symbolizes or is associated with higher status or club membership. For instance, whether an Olympian was motivated by money, international recognition, or the doomed urge to impress their parents in-law, it has no bearing on whether the medal they win is a status symbol. This implies we can identify and investigate the effects of status symbols—where they “work,” for how long, and where, as well as probe questions of why they do or do not function, without worrying about whether the actor involved was motivated by status.

As this should imply, a major advantage of this approach is that it sidesteps the methodological minefield of disentangling status from other motivations (Gilady, 2018: 10–12). Indeed, adjudicating between “symbolic” and “primary” utility, or between security, economic and status motivations, has indeed become to go-to approach of most research within the field (de Carvalho and Neumann, 2015: 5; Larson and Shevchenko, 2003). However, this strategy only become more perilous when one attempts to figure out whose motivation matters in practice: leaders, citizens, bureaucrats, or some combination of the three (see Renshon, 2017; Ward, 2017). In contrast, we accept that status symbols have other utility and may be sought for other reasons than just status. By foregrounding symbols and their effects, rather than exerting our analytical energies disentangling motivation, it allows us to direct more attention toward different but nonetheless important questions concerning their temporality, functionality, multivocality, and manipulability.

To foreground status symbols, we ask our authors to study them by inducting and recovering their meaning through the practices and discourses that constitute them (Adler-Nissen, 2017; Baciu and Kotzé, 2022; Beaumont, 2024; Neumann, 2014; Pouliot, 2014, 2016; Røren, 2023; Schmitt, 2020). Thus, instead of assuming that certain attributes grant status, we start analytically from shared “sayings” and “doings.” For example, Pouliot (2016) has convincingly shown that a sublime act of practice generates social status (see Naylor, 2024). Being on top of the diplomatic pecking order—achieving high status—gives practitioners more influence and power. What in turn constitutes a sublime practice, Pouliot argues, depends on the shared knowledge, experiences, and interpretations of what constitutes practical mastery within a given social field (Pouliot, 2016: 55–56). Thus, the best way to understand status dynamics, according to Pouliot, is to “zoom in on how international practitioners conceive of status markers, how they rank countries, and according to what rules of the game.” (Pouliot, 2014: 192). Moreover, the symbolic meaning attached to the status symbols depends on the shared (and thus contextual) understanding—observable through discourse—of a how a practice, object, or event, relates to an international hierarchy. For example, Adler-Nissen (2017) has unpacked the discursive processes through which status symbols become significant inside the European Union. Here, the production of hierarchy inside the Eurozone is structured around the rankings of national performance which in turn are reinforced or mediated by mutual stereotyping and shaming within member states’ domestic politics (Adler-Nissen, 2017: 217–218).

As such, identifying, exploring, and documenting the practices and discourse surrounding the hierarchies of international actors can reveal the patterns of social interaction that give things, privileges, and behavior, their symbolic meaning. The interpretivist angle of this special issue is thus not focused on the form of power or influence that actors derive from getting a status symbol, but rather toward what makes them meaningful symbolic vehicles in the first place, and how this meaning is maintained, reproduced, and contested, and with what effect, in the international and domestic sphere. We are convinced grounding analysis in actors’ own interpretations of the status symbols in question will put the articles’ empirical inquiries on firmer methodological footing.

Outline of the Special Issue

Despite their theoretical and methodological variations, the contributors of this special issue all employ an interpretative approach while exploring the temporality, functionality, multivocality, and manipulability of status symbols in world politics. In the first article of this special issue, Leira and de Carvalho (2024) explore the evolution of opera performances and opera houses as status symbols from the 16th century up until today. Opera houses according to the authors function as status symbols through double multivocality. First, they are multivocally articulated through their combination of architecture and performance, form, and content. Second, they are multivocally sent and received by cities, in domestic politics and internationally. Leira and de Carvalho explore how Opera Houses’ ability to speak to several audiences simultaneously multiplies their symbolic power and has turned them into an international status symbol par excellence. The authors argue opera initially generated their prestige from political prominence and the status of opera music. However, as illustrated by the case of the Oslo Opera House that opened in 2008, Leira and de Carvalho show how Opera houses as status symbols became increasingly embodied in the house of opera and became disassociated from what went on inside.

Unlike Leira and de Carvalho’s focus on the incremental and organic rise of status symbols, Maria Hadjiathanasiou’s (2024) contribution to the special issue focuses on status symbols imposed from above and over a relatively narrower time span. In particular, Hadjiathanasiou’s article investigates the temporality and manipulability of status symbols by examining how agents of imperial governance and education, such as the British Council, introduced recognized status symbols of social positionality to a select local colonial audience. These imperial experiments in “cultural development” aimed to groom future local leaders and influencers who would be positively inclined toward “the British way” and cherish the “British connection,” thus furthering Britain’s global reach and national interests. Drawing on unpublished archival materials from 1950s colonial Cyprus, Hadjiathanasiou thus provides a novel microlevel reading of the management and unraveling of Britain’s empire—and its associated prestige. Moreover, the article details how Britain’s use of status symbols on its colonial subjects both sought to maintain and relied on its international prestige.

Keeping with the topic of asymmetrical power relationships, Maria Mälksoo (2024) in her article explores how hegemonic military presence can become a valuable status symbol for smaller power allies. Mälksoo investigates the transformation of status symbols in post-Soviet countries, showing how American “boots on the ground” became symbolically status-charged over the post-Cold War period. Highlighting the multivocality of status symbol, counterintuitively, Mälksoo illuminates how military vulnerability and accepting shared sovereignty in military affairs—qualities that normally are associated with stigma rather than status—are key in constructing US foreign deployments as a status symbol. The esteem associated with American boots on the ground, Mälksoo argues, stems from the unique historical context, geopolitical situation, and standing within NATO that particularly Polish and Baltic states found themselves in after the Cold War.

Status symbols are not, however, just for the smaller states in world politics. In his contribution, Tristen Naylor (2024) explores the role of agency and manipulability of status symbols through the lens of a club in the upper echelons of international society: The G7. Naylor investigates how international summits serve as a platform for the performance of status symbols, which are carefully managed and curated to maintain their symbolic value. In ethnographically detailing the complex labor involved in making an international summit succeed and the many risks involved in these processes, Naylor argues that global summitry fosters two dimensions of status competition: social differentiation between participants and excluded outsiders, and competition among the members of the exclusive club. The host government, in particular, can temporarily elevate its status by demonstrating desirable attributes and showcasing its competence as an organizer and global leader. This status dynamic, according to Naylor, maintained by the hidden dimensions of summit management, work together to (re)produce and manipulate the summit as a high-status context and the practice of summitry itself as a status symbol.

Freistein and Müller (2024) also explore the manipulability of status symbols. Drawing on Bourdieu, they develop a discursive approach to status symbols that distinguishes three phases of their temporal life cycle—creation, institutionalization, and capitalization—to show how certain practices and achievements are turned into new status symbols and how these status symbols can be converted into other forms of capital. Illustrating the value of their life cycle approach, they explore the use of country performance rankings and the role of COP presidency as status symbols of leadership in global climate politics. Examining the contestation around and effects of these status symbols—in terms of their success inspiring prosocial competition in climate politics—Freistein and Müller provide a warning to optimists hoping to manipulate status symbols for the public good: status symbols within the climate field is structured by broader and stickier patterns of stratification.

How status symbols fall and wither, and sometimes are converted into symbols of stigma, is further explored by Hisarlıoğlu and Yanık’s (2024) historical approach to status symbols within the Ottoman empire. The authors examine the inversion in meaning Ottoman Empire’s status symbols from the 13th to the 19th century: how the Ottoman self-perceived symbols of status transformed into symbols of inferiority and stigma as the empire became incorporated into the Western-led international society during the 19th century. The article illustrates an extreme form of multivocality: Up until its incorporation into the international society, Ottoman territorial expansion and conquest alongside a wide array of diplomatic practices were not intended to signal status over any particular other. In other words, it did not matter whether other polities shared this estimation of esteem associated with the symbols. Instead, they were vehicles that contributed to the articulation of a self-declared global status hegemony of the empire. Hisarlıoğlu and Yanık argue that this privilege relied on the Ottoman’s military strength vis-à-vis the West. Furthermore, they carefully show that this self-perception would steadily become untenable and ultimately inverted through the course of the 19th century, as the Ottoman empire was forced to adapt to growing power asymmetries between itself and the western great powers.

Last but not least, Beaumont et al.’s (2024) contribution explores how status symbols can backfire. Building on the work by van der Westhuizen (2021), the authors theorize that the high cost and multivocality of status symbols makes status-seekers intrinsically vulnerable to domestic backlashes. Using Brazil’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games, Britain’s nuclear weapons policy, and Norway’s involvement in military interventions in the 2000s, the authors identify three “modes of critique” that status-seeking governments are vulnerable to. Opportunity costs are critiques based on the alternative use of resources invested in status symbols; critiques of vested interests concern criticism that certain groups disproportionately benefit materially through acquiring the status symbol; while subservience critiques refer to domestic narratives framing a particular status symbol as a sign of submission and servility, rather than assertiveness and pride. Demonstrating the salience of these critiques across all three cases, the authors call for more research into what they call “the politics of status” exploring how domestic audiences explicitly debate their state’s status-seeking and how the dynamic can generate gains and impose costs for governments.

In this concluding article of the special issue, William C. Wohlforth (2024) critically reflects on the contributions made by the preceding articles to the study of status research and IR in general. Wohlforth depicts the contributions to this special issue as “small-s” status—focused on everyday status symbols—rather than traditional “first wave” ‘big-S’ great power dynamics (Thompson, 2014: 220) and sets about identifying how the issue’s contributions speak to big-S works. Drawing on the findings, he builds a typology of pure, impure, and ambiguous status symbols. He then suggests that impure and ambiguous status symbols offer practical utility alongside symbolic value which lowers the opportunity costs. Sometimes, they might even pursue what he calls ‘inadvertent status symbols’: actions or things that are not done or acquired for status, yet still yield status dividends. This leads him to conclude—ironically given the interpretivist commitments of the special issue—that overall the issue contests conventional big-S wisdom by showing how status-seeking can indeed be rational. In other words, small-s status-seeking can deliver international and domestic payoffs without the heavy costs associated with big-S confrontations.

Fostering pluralism in status research: a complement and a challenge to status research

The seminal edited volume, Status in World Politics, defines social status as “collective beliefs about a given state’s ranking on valued attributes” (Larson et al., 2014: 7). This definition has produced valuable insights across a wide range of cases using a diverse set of theoretical and methodological toolkits. However, we would argue that the field has since largely overlooked how these set of “collective beliefs” are formed, contested, and eventually supplanted. To remedy this blind spot, the special issue showcased the value of an explicitly interpretative inquiries into the workings of international status: giving sustained attention to status symbols’ meaning in context and over time. Indeed, in a key statement of the status research agenda more than a decade ago, William Wohlforth (2009: 38) noted that status and “its expression appears endlessly varied,” and those working on it are “struck by its variability and diversity than by its susceptibility to generalization.” The most prominent status works have met this challenge by wielding methodologies designed to simplify, standardize, and generalize status dynamics. As successful as some of these efforts have been in generating big picture conclusions, their methodological toolkit has necessarily left a great deal of status dynamics on the cutting room floor. Yet, we contend that advancing IR’s status research agenda will require looking again at what was discarded with fresh eyes and a theoretical apparatus attuned to complexity and at ease with historical specificity. Indeed, by inviting our eight contributions to develop and deploy an interpretivist framework, we aimed to organize and showcase the value of interpretivist approach to status which counts an impressive but too often seemingly disparate body of work.

We contend that the special issue’s commitment to interpretivist methodologies has reaped dividends. The contributors unpack the multivocal meanings that generate the symbolism of opera houses and account for the inversion of Ottoman status symbols over the longue durée. They dissect the historical–social conditions that have turned conceding sovereign authority into the symbol of high status, and conversely, identify how an international status symbol can become a domestic stigma. In other words, our contributors highlight latent potentialities and complexity of international status symbols that do not readily lend themselves to generalization but to overlook would impoverish IR’s understanding of status.

Drawing together our contributors, we can synthesize the contribution of this issue into three categories: complements, challenges, and conceptual development. In complementing the existing literature, several of our contributors speak to puzzles that have become apparent with the success of the first wave of status research. First, while status research has identified the omnipresence of status-seeking, it has proven less apt to show that it succeeds: leading to higher status. Hence, Mercer (2017) among others have argued that status-seeking—even on its own terms—is an irrational pursuit (Glaser, 2018). Our contributors suggest that this charge may be the product of these scholars narrow and limited conception of how status symbols work and what effects they need to have to prove successful. Indeed, whether organizing competition for favor within an alliance (Mälksoo, 2024), facilitating colonial management (Hadjiathanasiou, 2024), or serving as an multivocal emblem of cultural development and capital for domestic consumption (Beaumont et al., 2024; Hisarlıoğlu and Yanık, 2024; Leira and de Carvalho, 2024), our contributors highlight functions of status symbols for both individual states and groups that are often excluded from scholars’ cost-benefit analyses of status-seeking. Second, and conversely, given the three mechanisms pointing toward status-seeking, others might expect there to be more status-seeking in IRs that we currently observe. Here, two of our contributors set about identifying the underacknowledged risks of status-seeking: Naylor’s (2024) ethnographic inquiry illuminates the high-stakes and high-maintenance operation that underpins a successful summit and the risks that may derail success despite careful planning, while the work by Beaumont et al. (2024) theorizes and identifies the intrinsic risks of domestic backlash that they argue accompanies even the successful performance of status symbols. By highlighting the hidden—or understudied costs of status-seeking—these lines of inquiry speak directly to a major overarching question of the research agenda: what accounts for the overall prevalence of status-seeking in international politics? While each of these articles are based on a handful of case studies, their insights—regarding undertheorized costs and benefits—should provide inspiration for more general models of status-seeking, thereby complementing the grand theoretical ambitions of first wave of status research.

Each of the works can be read as fleshing out and thereby complementing research that is agent-centric and focused on deducing motivations. Yet, five of the seven contributions identify significant change over time in the meaning and thus value of the status symbol. In addition, several contributions also showcase the multiplicity of the same status symbol. These insights provide provisional grounds to contest or at least pose questions regarding the practice of treating international status hierarchies as sufficiently stable and intersubjectively shared that they can be treated as an independent variable. This issue is most pronounced for status discrepancy work, which builds into its research design the notion that certain status attributes have served as global status symbols for the duration of the state system. Read another way, the special issue should prompt positivist status scholars to more carefully limit their generalizations and better specify both the temporal and the social context where the value of status symbols is manifested.

Finally, while largely eschewing general theories, each of our contributions makes a conceptual contribution to the study of status. Indeed, the articles do more than just highlighting the nuance or contextualize status symbols in a manner that King and colleagues (1994: 34) might dismiss as “summaries of historical detail” awaiting their operationalization in a truly scientific research design. Each contribution actively theorizes: all of our contributors explicitly use or develop a heuristic—or a lens—for making sense of status symbols. These lenses—as our contributors demonstrate—can structure the production of systematic knowledge about the phenomenon in question (see Dunne et al., 2013). They generate claims that are empirically contestable, and we hope will be contested. While these lenses are not generalizable in the conventional sense—none strive to specify the conditions under which putatively independent and dependent variables will covary—they do strive to be transferable (Schwartz-Shea, 2015: 142): capable of being used to generate new insight into status symbols in different contexts given sustained effort on behalf of the “lens-wearer.” They may throw more light on some cases more than others, but an inability to make sense of a different case could not falsify the lens, just as wearing a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription does not render them useless. Ultimately, these lenses strive to enable scholars, practitioners and citizens to see their worlds in new ways that would be missed absent the lens. In this sense, they are not merely of scholarly value—facilitating the production of scientific knowledge—but also politically useful too.

To conclude, we would like to underline that prioritizing of an interpretivist approach was not a claim to superiority but an attempt to rebalance what we saw as a positivist dominance within IR status research. Indeed, taking inspiration from Beaumont and de Coning’s (2022; cf. Lapid, 2003) argument that complex phenomena require a diversity of epistemologies that engage one another with humility, we suggest that IR status research should self-consciously seek to foster epistemological pluralism characterized by dialogue across difference. ⁴ Therefore, rather than entering into a pitched battle with some methodological other, we would suggest that our contributors’ theorizing and empirics could be translated into or inspire positivist-leaning colleagues. We would encourage all such productive engagements. Indeed, with this special issue, we do not seek to replace positivist IR status research, but by strengthening its interpretivist wing, we will help foster an enduring pluralism that will help push the agenda in new directions.