Since Thucydides had the Athenians justify their pursuit of empire with reference to these three motives, honor has been theorized by scholars of (proto-) International Relations as one of the key motivational drives behind (international) conflict. There are two broad and contradictory takes on the relationship of status concerns to conflict in the literature. On the one hand, rationalist approaches tend to view status as a relative good (and, indeed, status concerns naturally imply and evoke hierarchies). Applying the terminology of the neo-neo debate, this implies that status gains are relative gains and thereby necessarily work to diminish the likelihood of cooperation and increase the risk of conflict in the system. By this logic, the rise of China for example, if perceived in status terms, will quasi-automatically aggrieve the US and strain the relationship between the two. The role of emotions like pride is side-lined in favor of a primacy of “rational fear”. On the other hand, social psychological approaches by and large maintain that it is not the pursuit for honor per se that is conflict-prone, but rather the denial of recognition of one actor’s perceived status by another. It is, by this logic, the emotion of hurt pride, triggered by a mismatch between one’s own status ambitions and the status ascribed by others, which induces conflict-prone behavior. Returning to our example, then, the implications of China’s status rise for the conflict-proneness of relations with the US would be contingent upon both US reactions and Chinese perceptions of them. The latter approach is clearly a less parsimonious starting point for IR theorizing, but it is empirically more firmly grounded in (social) psychology. The two approaches furthermore clearly have dramatically different implications for the nature of status concerns and the degree of determinism of their conflict-inducing effects. Continued in “Outline”.
