Over the past quarter century, a large literature has grown up around the question of how status concerns influence international politics. This scholarship is varied and has evolved and advanced over time but largely agrees on a core theoretical and empirical claim: when a state’s treatment by relevant others does not match its understanding of its position in the international hierarchy, the result is often some form of conflict. This proposition has been made in a variety of ways—drawing, for instance, on both social psychological and rationalist theoretical foundations—and supported using a variety of evidence—including historical case studies, experiments, and large cross-national data sets.

In Status, States, and Moral Sentiments, Reinhard Wolf makes this argument in a new way, by focusing on the concepts of respect and disrespect. Wolf defines respect as the appropriate recognition of an actor’s social status, and disrespect as the failure to recognize the same (p. 32). Respect and disrespect affect the quality of relations between states. Respect promotes cooperation because it validates the respected actor’s social identity, and because it promotes trust in the respectful actor; disrespect promotes conflict because it makes the disrespected actor angry, and because it produces instrumental incentives to coerce the disrespectful actor to change its behavior (pp. 86–98). Wolf tests these claims in three contemporary case studies, selected to highlight the role of respect and disrespect, and to interest readers—U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War, the conflict between Greece and the European Union after the 2008 financial crisis, and the U.S.-North Korean relationship during the first Trump administration.

Over a third of the book is devoted to laying out Wolf’s conceptual and theoretical framework, and much of this focuses on distinguishing his approach from that taken by previous scholarship on status and recognition. This careful analysis results in some important insights—for instance, that the significance of “misrecognition” lies more in the fact that it conveys disrespect than that it results in “epistemic uncertainty” (p. 48). Wolf also elaborates a useful distinction between what he calls “prestige” and “role status,” which centers partially on the question of whether status comparisons depend upon “shared standards of evaluation” (p. 69). This is an intriguing point because of the recent debate over the extent to which status constitutes shared knowledge, or alternatively status evaluations tend to diverge sharply across international boundaries in a way that reflects actors’ own identities and interests (Mercer, Jonathan. 2017. “The Illusion of International Prestige,” International Security 41(4); Beaumont, Paul. 2024. The Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics). Unfortunately, Wolf does not engage this debate, but an implication of his model might be that because status dynamics rooted in deference hierarchies make weaker assumptions about epistemological consensus than do those rooted in “prestige” hierarchies, they may be relevant in a wider range of contexts.

In some ways, though, the effort to distance his theoretical approach from existing scholarship appears strained. For instance, Wolf repeatedly stresses that status and respect are distinct concepts, and that prior work has erred by paying too little attention to the latter (see chapter 1, throughout). Part of the distinction is that respect is intrinsically “relational”—that “we seem to ‘do’ or ‘convey’ something when we respect or disrespect another person or group.” The concepts of status and prestige are not relational in this manner—“the United States…can show ‘respect’ for Brazil or any other nation or government. However, it cannot show ‘prestige’ or ‘status’ to them, let alone ‘dis-prestige’ or ‘dis-status’ to another state or its leadership” (p. 28).

This is all reasonable but also not novel to the status literature. Almost all definitions of status stipulate that status depends intrinsically on recognition by relevant others (Dafoe, Allan, Jonathan Renshon, and Paul Huth. 2014. “Reputation and Status as Motives for War,” Annual Review of Political Science 17). In other words, claims to status are made real only once they are recognized by other actors. This key element of the definition of status explains the literature’s focus on disjunctures between status claims or expectations and actual status. That focus parallels Wolf’s fixation on respect and disrespect, but uses a different vocabulary—for instance “status accommodation” and “status denial” (Ward, Steven. 2020. “Status, Stratified Rights, and Accommodation in International Relations,” Journal of Global Security Studies 5(1)). Critically, though, those terms denote similar phenomena—actions that signal or demonstrate whether or not one actor takes seriously another actor’s claim to a particular position in an international hierarchy. While scholars have adopted different approaches to observing or measuring recognition or accommodation, the conceptual and theoretical apparatus is broadly similar to Wolf’s respect-based framework.

The key question, then, is whether the respect-based approach adds empirical value—whether it helps us understand international relations better than existing frameworks. Wolf’s case studies are well-written and—as promised—interesting. As he himself notes, though, their methodological value as tests of his theory is somewhat limited due to their recency—there is little available scholarship or information that would facilitate a firm assessment of the extent to which respect and disrespect actually entered into the deliberations and calculations of decision-makers in the manner predicted by the theory.

The case studies are limited in another way. While a large part of the book is devoted to establishing a theoretical distinction between Wolf’s approach and the approaches of others working on status in world politics, that distinction largely disappears in the empirical part of the book. Wolf sets up the case studies as contests between his theory and two alternative explanations, both of which he labels “rationalist”—neorealism and liberalism (p. 113). What is missing, though, is an effort to evaluate the degree to which his approach offers a better interpretation than do the status theories that the theoretical chapter found wanting.

Such an analysis would have been particularly useful (and natural) in the study of the trajectory of U.S.-Russia relations after the end of the Cold War. This is something of an ur-case for the modern literature on status in international relations, and has featured repeatedly in a wide selection of prominent work (among many others, see Larson, Deborah and Alexei Shevchenko. Quest for Status; Anne Clunan, The Social Construction of Russia’s Resurgence; Radchenko, Sergey. 2020. “‘Nothing but Humiliation for Russia’: Moscow and NATO’s eastern enlargement, 1993–1995,” Journal of Strategic Studies 43(6–7); Marten, Kimberly. 2017. “Reconsidering NATO expansion: A counterfactual analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of International Security 3(2)). The typical story suggests—as Wolf does—that Russia’s turn against the United States and the Western order more broadly is attributable to a succession of actions (involving NATO enlargement, intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the invasion of Iraq) that signaled to Russia that Washington did not see it as an equal in the post-Cold War era. While Wolf admirably demonstrates that the so-called “rationalist” approaches fail in this case, what is not clear is how labeling U.S. actions acts of disrespect (as Wolf does) rather than status denial or misrecognition or accommodation failure fundamentally improves on what is by now a familiar account of the role of status concerns in the modern history of relations between Russia and the United States.