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ID: 186184

Decline and Disintegration: National Status Loss and Domestic Conflict in Post-Disaster Spain / Ward, Steven

Ward, Steven	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Decline has long been a central concern of international relations scholarship, but analysts have only recently begun to investigate whether a change in international status influences a state's domestic politics. A new theoretical framework for understanding the domestic political consequences of relative national decline posits that eroding national status activates two sets of social psychological dynamics that contribute to domestic conflict inside declining states. First, eroding state status prompts some groups to strengthen their commitment to the state's status and dominant national identity, at the same time as it prompts other groups to disidentify from the state. Second, eroding status produces incentives for substate actors to derogate and scapegoat one another. These dynamics are particularly likely to contribute to center-periphery conflict in multinational states after instances of acute status loss. The plausibility of the argument is demonstrated by showing how the erosion of Spain's status (especially because of military failure in the 1898 Spanish-American War and the subsequent loss of its last colonies in the Americas) intensified domestic conflict in Spain during the first decades of the twentieth century. Findings indicate that decline may actually exacerbate domestic conflict, making it more difficult for states to adopt appropriate reforms.

Key Words

National Status ; Loss and Domestic Conflict ; Post-Disaster Spain

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ID: 124787

Race, status, and Japanese revisionism in the early 1930s / Ward, Steven

Ward, Steven	Journal Article
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2013.

Summary/Abstract

This paper develops and illustrates a novel theoretical explanation for maximal revisionist challenges to the status quo. I argue that some rising great powers become dissatisfied with the normative and constitutive structure of the status quo and therefore incapable of or unwilling to orient themselves toward reassurance, not because of increasing capabilities but rather due to the domestic political effects produced by perceptions of status immobility-the idea that the status quo is unable to accommodate the rising state's claims to increased status and prestige. I illustrate the argument by showing that Japan's increasing revisionism after 1931 can in large part be explained by widespread perceptions of status immobility linked to Japanese understandings of the role of race in the maintenance of the Western-dominated status hierarchy.

Key Words

Japan ; WAr strategy ; Six Day War ; Hierarchy ; Immobility ; International Relations - IR ;
History - 1930 ; Japanese Revisionism ; Widespread Perceptions ; Western Domination ; Strategy

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ID: 171808

Status, Stratified Rights, and Accommodation in International Relations / Ward, Steven

Ward, Steven	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Denied status claims can produce serious interstate conflict and accommodation may thus be an important means of avoiding conflict with rising and reemerging status seekers such as China and Russia. But accommodation is an underdeveloped concept. This article draws on scholarship about recognition and hierarchy to propose a novel means of understanding status accommodation: as behavior that sends signals to status seekers about the validity of claims to stratified rights. This framework implies that acts that signal status denial (and thus cause conflict over status) may be driven by three broad kinds of processes: anxiety about a state's position in the world; incompatibility between nonstatus interests and claims to status-implicated rights; and fears about the implications of status accommodation for the validity of discourses and ideas that produce both international and domestic order. These dynamics—especially the latter two—may be linked to domestic political mechanisms and concerns in ways that analysts do not fully appreciate. I illustrate the framework by examining the forces that drove the United States to deny Japanese claims to equal status during the decades before World War II.

Key Words

Great Powers ; Hierarchy ; Recognition ; Accommodation ; IR Theory ; Status

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