Exercising “Status Concern Sensibility” in International Diplomatic Crisis: Sino-India Relations in the Late 90s

In recent years, challenging the traditional neorealist idea that security is the overarching motivation of states, an increasing number of studies have focused on the concept of status in world politics, exploring why, when, and how states can be concerned with their position in the international pecking order. Still, while acknowledging that the struggle for status recognition can heighten diplomatic conflicts between adversaries in international politics, the scholarship has tended to overlook the role that empathy plays in shaping peaceful processes of status recognition. This article theorises the idea of “status concern sensibility” as an actor’s capacity to convey and exercise an empathic understanding of another’s interests and concerns related to their international status. Through a qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources related to Sino-India relations in the aftermath of India’s 1998 nuclear tests Pokhran-II, it argues that the exercise of mutual “status concern sensibility” on the part of Indian and Chinese decision-makers was the key for avoiding a major diplomatic crisis between the two countries and paved the way for their mutual status recognition. Integrating the idea of empathy in the study of status-driven international diplomatic conflicts, this article contributes to our understanding of ways of fostering peaceful processes of status recognition in world politics, and to our knowledge of the emotional components of status concerns.