Temporality and Rising Powers: How Momentum Affects Status Recognition

• In Event: Emerging Scholars Lightning Round: Graduate Student Research: Understanding Military, Economic, and Status Security in Contemporary and Historical Contexts

Abstract

The existing IR studies on status politics often adopt a static view of social hierarchy based on states’ contemporary material power or normative performance, ignoring how temporality plays a crucial role in status recognition. Drawing on insights from social psychology, this paper develops a dynamic theory of status momentum. It seeks to explain how intertemporal changes in rank in the past and expectations of future rank changes affect states’ status judgments and recognitions. For states having similar material power and memberships in elite clubs, states are judged as having higher status when they arrive at their position by ascending, rather than descending, the hierarchy. The theory will be tested through its application to imperial Japan and contemporary China.

Author

• Pengqiao Lu, McGill University