The Art of Status

Culturally significant artifacts and fine art would seem to be fairly stable status markers. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Munch’s Scream are all centerpieces of their respective museums and sources of national pride and international status. One of the many valuable contributions of Subotić’s The Art of Status is the demonstration that the status of works of art is not fixed permanently. This is particularly so for works that have forcibly changed ownership and/or been removed from their original context. These become objects which may “remain valuable also through the process of deaccession – restitution or return” (p. 13).

Starting with the Enlightenment, Subotić shows how a growing interest in public museums and the stewarding of art and artefacts happened just before the first “modern” systematic looting of art, carried out by the French armies from the middle of the 1790s, and to the end of the Napoleonic wars. Importantly, both stewarding and looting were rooted in ideas of civilization and civilizational hierarchies. Eagerly acquiring artifacts for their museums, nineteenth-century European empires sought to demonstrate civilizational predominance by establishing themselves as the protectors and carriers of civilization. While France and the United Kingdom had early mover advantages here, most other Western states soon followed: “Imperial powers looted art in large part to compete with their rivals who were doing the same” (pp. 15–16).

The intimate connection between looted art, restitution, and international status is explored through three cases. The first is the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon in Athens and brought to the United Kingdom, and housed in the British Museum since 1816. The second case is the Benin Bronzes, looted during the British punitive expedition in 1897 and then spread through a number of museums in Europe and North America. The final case is Nazi-looted artworks from the 1930s and 1940s. Through meticulous research on both primary and secondary sources, Subotić demonstrates how the looting itself was driven by desires for status and explicit status competition. She also vividly describes how the status associated with these works of art has changed over time, by the early twenty-first century becoming status liabilities or even sources of international stigmatization. These analyses are highly readable as stand-alone case studies, and it must be pointed out that the work on looted Nazi art relies in part on important in-depth primary research on the provenance of artwork previously unexplored.

Through the chapters, a chronology emerges, with the status of the looted artwork changing over time. From around the turn of the eighteenth century, European powers were eagerly acquiring artwork through a combination of conquests, excavations, bribery, and meager payments. While the artwork taken from other European polities was at least partially restituted after 1815, the material stemming from the “antiquities rush” remained in Western museums. The logic and justification for taking these pieces of art to grand museums in London and Paris was decidedly civilizational, albeit with some nuances. As Subotić discusses in more explicit detail in a parallel work (“The 19th-century ‘antiquities rush’ and the international competition for cultural status,” Review of International Studies, 51(6), 2025), the French idea was to have custodianship. As they reasoned that the best art should be considered to have been produced by “French” citizens, it rightly belonged in France. The British idea was more one of descendance, where relics from ancient Mediterranean civilizations were seen as proof of Britain being the true “heir to classical civilisation” (p. 70).

The late nineteenth-century craze for Benin Bronzes came in a different status setting. The British punitive expedition must, in and of itself, be understood as a status-undertaking, to demonstrate British imperial power and to spread the moral authority of abolitionism. The artwork itself had little intrinsic value, only gradually gaining respect as art in its own right. And unlike the antiquities, the logic was not one of civilizational continuity, but of civilizational difference. The systematic Nazi looting in the 1930s and 1940s was, even more so than earlier periods of looting and acquisition, tied up with domestic perceptions of what should grant status recognition. While both marbles and bronzes were seen to grant status by a number of states in the international system, the looted Nazi art was primarily for internal consumption. This was partially about the genocidal policies of the Holocaust—looting the property of Jews and others destined for extinction and erasing “degenerate” art. But there were also echoes of the Napoleonic hierarchical drive to have all the best art collected with the Nazi custodians of civilization. And finally, a desire to demonstrate that “the highest international cultural status is something that can be accomplished through military conquest, domination and annihilation of any opposition” (p. 148).

And finally, we have witnessed a gradual turn toward restitution, clearly tied to decolonization and the growing Holocaust remembrance. Here, the status competition has found a new outlet, namely in being the best at returning looted artwork. Some art has been returned, while there is an overall trend in museum presentation moving from showcasing objects to discussing provenance history. While there are still holdouts, states and museums refusing to at least engage in conversation about these topics are facing the very real risk that their previously prized status symbols might become status liabilities, and even sources of international stigma that can question their international position.

The Politics of World Heritage

Just as Subotić shows how individual artworks can serve to bolster the prestige of states, so too can places of special significance. Most of us would intuitively think that being home to the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Giza, or the Acropolis naturally confers some sort of cultural distinction. What Elif Kalaycioglu shows through her analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage regime is the extent to which the status attached to these sites is neither self-evident nor given. On the contrary, the process of designating “the most special places in the world” is deeply political and fundamentally structures social hierarchies of cultural prestige among states. For where some international organizations offer the promise of security or prosperity, inclusion on the World Heritage List promises states something arguably even more seductive, that is, a recognized position in the story of humanity.

Kalaycioglu’s analysis is impressive in all respects. Based on a broad array of primary materials encompassing a number of archives, her sources also include a broad set of interviews and participant observation. Most of all, though, by asking what it means “to produce a shared cultural history of humanity” and what “these efforts produce in the world,” her highly original analysis provides a productive platform to think about the importance of culture in international ordering more broadly. Kalaycioglu’s core argument is as intuitively seductive as it is deceptively simple. The World Heritage regime does more than preserve the common culture of humanity; it produces a social order that adjudicates standing among states according to competing visions of humanity. By determining which sites are to be granted official standing as having “outstanding universal value” to humanity, the List also adjudicates who can identify as custodians of humanity’s common heritage, and who can credibly identify as the main protagonists of cultural progress.

In the early decades (1978–1991), Kalaycioglu shows that humanity was interpreted as a “rarefied transhistorical subject.” The sites that best represented such a conception tended to be, unsurprisingly, suspiciously European. Sites showcasing “material monumentality” represented an “order of things” from “primitive” to “civilized” (p. 16), and artifacts “acquired” through imperial conquests were displayed in European metropoles, with Europe as the vanguard of civilization, while excluding others. The regime was marked by esteemed expert adjudications that determined who was recognized as the custodians of the common heritage of mankind. Such an order was, not surprisingly, the object of much criticism aimed at redressing inherited inequalities so that “less known cultures” could be helped to discover their “place in the world and assert [themselves] in the international context.” (UNESCO 1982, World Conference on Cultural Policies: Final Report as cited on p. 127) If the List represented humanity as a whole, why did it look like a scenic tour of Europe?

Responding to the critique opened up a new phase of the regime (1994–2010). The criteria for inclusion were broadened, projecting a new vision of humanity as a “diverse subject,” united by common experience such as “subsistence, relations to nature” (p. 139) and represented through anthropological resources (p. 129). States were increasingly positioned as “possessors” of valued sites rather than as their “custodians” (p. 94). With such a change, the role of expert adjudicators also changed, now valuing local expertise. But although this led to the inclusion of more non-European sites, there was still “cultural continuity staked on monumental urbanity” (p. 122). Thus, the inclusion of a broader set of sites did not necessarily change the fact that states seeking status through cultural distinction still did so through projecting themselves onto a Eurocentric social order whose gravitational pull was not easily dethroned.

The most important shift, however, occurs after 2010, when states from the Global South increasingly started to challenge expert adjudications and offer their own alternative justifications. These justifications were increasingly grounded in cultural universes, which corresponded with national borders, imaginaries, and trajectories. The result was a flattened understanding of humanity as little more than an aggregation of states. As states push their own notions of universal value, humanity emerges as a “subject that is adequately represented by the community of states” (pp. 2–8). Championed by certain states from the Global South, most notably emerging powers, this change represented a clear move away from an understanding of the List as representing humanity’s shared heritage. As expert adjudicators are increasingly turned down by states eager to be the judge of their own merits, the regime is increasingly moving toward “a long honor’s list of national heritage” (p. 191).

Throughout the analysis, Kalaycioglu shows how inclusion on the List offers cultural prestige and recognition as a civilization-bearing state. She notes how first inclusions are celebrated when Namibia “joined the World Heritage family” (p. 143). The evaluation of Japan’s 2015 nomination of “Sites of Japan’s Meji Industrial Revolution” for inclusion in the List is also telling from a status perspective, in that it made the case that this unique Asian response to Western industrial values had “enabled Japan to become a world-ranking nation” (cited on p. 217). After 2010, a basic understanding of status symbols as monumental has given way to an explicit competition for prestige within the regime. As emerging powers’ “desire for cultural prestige” comes to permeate the regime (p. 177), and as “the allure of place in this social order has trumped solidarity around principled disagreement” (p. 178), cultural recognition as social hierarchy has also become more explicit and prominent within the politics of cultural heritage.

Social Orders as Status Orders

Both studies are remarkable for their longitudinal study of artifacts and heritage sites as status symbols whose meanings change over time, both as a function of processes internal to the politics of culture, which they analyze, or as the result of exogenous pressures or changes in the broader normative environment in which these cultural objects are cast. Thus, both Subotić and Kalaycioglu capture how the significance of status symbols changes over time, as well as how the same objects are reinterpreted and given new symbolic meaning over time. Their analyses also highlight a more important feature of social orders, namely that to the extent that the grammar of the order changes over time, we also need to make sense of how states creatively adapt status strategies to these changing normative environments.

Subotić shows us how artifacts that once conferred standing as bearers of civilization, when showcased in metropolitan art museums, suddenly carry the stigma of imperialism and brutal colonial subjugation when showcased in those same places (on stigma, see Rebecca Adler-Nissen, “Stigma Management in International Relations,” International Organization, 68(1), 2014). But her analysis does not stop there, as giving up these objects does not lead to a status loss. Rather, it allows the museums and states to recast their role as custodians of humanity by generously returning these artifacts to their rightful owners. As Subotić shows, the act of returning these objects confers even higher status on former imperial powers, now competing along a hierarchy of benevolence. Discussing President Macron’s 2017 initiative to return looted African art, she notes how “the French claim to moral authority on the issue of restitution spurred its own race among European states and their national museums” (p. 53). A similar logic is captured by Kalaycioglu when she notes how, in 2004, even France and the United Kingdom criticized the List “for not devoting enough attention to non-European heritage and for trying to apply to other regions of the world models of valuation developed in Europe” or “for presenting a Eurocentric analysis” (p. 149). It is worth highlighting that the narratives of the two studies tell parallel stories, with a development from a Eurocentric status order, via attempts at creating a seemingly more open universalist status order, to a status order where states in the Global South have become more assertive in their quest for status in orders increasingly of their own making.

Beyond the status politics of cultural artefacts and world heritage, both Subotić and Kalaycioglu share a concern with the extent to which objects, places, and practices that may appear to have little intrinsic value acquire significance through the social hierarchies in which they are embedded. Artworks become prestigious through exhibiting aesthetic qualities, but also because of the cultural recognition they come to carry within specific international orders. In a similar vein, heritage sites do more than neutrally reflect humanity’s shared past. They function as markers of standing within broader social hierarchies. Both works thus push to advance the analysis of status symbols in international relations further (see notably Paul Beaumont and Pål Røren, “Status symbols in world politics,” Cooperation and Conflict, 60(1), 2025; Lilach Gilady, 2018, The Price of Prestige; Michelle Murray, 2018, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations). They do so by highlighting structural consequences of status recognition, namely the social orders which these status symbols contribute to stratify. Cultural artifacts and heritage sites function as markers through which states imagine and communicate their place within an international order.

Both accounts offer ways to understand the relationship between social orders and status orders, as the politics of culture emerges as a manifestation of a broader phenomenon, namely the structuring of international relations through social orders of recognition. Social orders, as most explicitly discussed by Kalaycioglu, are characterized by patterns of inclusion and exclusion, differentiated subject positions, and identities through which states claim legitimacy and prestige. Thus, beyond defining membership, social orders also help adjudicate the legitimacy of states’ claims to authority, civilization, and leadership.

Just as membership to the heritage list does, showcasing culturally significant artworks and artifacts functions as a form of symbolic capital. To states, culture is important beyond its intrinsic value in that they mobilize it as a marker of “civilizational grandeur” and “historical agency.” This has been as important to newly independent states as to the old imperial capitals. As Subotić points out, art restitution has been in part “an effort by the decolonized nations to seek international recognition” (p. 44), and independence has often been followed rapidly by the establishment of national museums. Inscription on the World Heritage List likewise generates “the possibility of prestige and recognition in the form of universally and institutionally valorized subjectivities.” (p. 12). The emphasis on changes in status thus explicitly brings out how order is always a process, it is ordering. Belonging to a social order is to have a position within a hierarchy of social standing. Thus, social orders determine which actors become legible within a given symbolic universe, but they also adjudicate claims to cultural capital, and in doing so, determine central and marginal identities. International relations, in this sense, may be more tangential to other social fields in which actors compete for social standing than what IR scholars like to recognize.

What these examples work to convey is an understanding of the politics of culture as an instance of a broader phenomenon in international relations, namely the continuous social structuring of the international through hierarchies of recognition. Both books, in that sense, help bridge IR with sociological research, which may offer useful perspectives for understanding the status dynamics of cultural orders. Just as Georg Simmel (in “Fashion,” The American Journal of Sociology, 62(6), 1957) famously showed how fashion operated as a mechanism of differentiation until it lost its exclusivity, Pierre Bourdieu (1984, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste) showed how cultural taste operated as a marker of distinction. The work of Erving Goffman (in “Symbols of Class Status,” The British Journal of Sociology, 2(4), 1951) too showed how symbols of class status worked to signal actors’ position within a social hierarchy. Possession of prestigious artifacts, just as recognition as custodians of humanity’s heritage, signals a form of standing that guides international interaction. As both Subotić and Kalaycioglu’s accounts make clear, material factors alone fall short of establishing prestige. Both show us how (material) cultural resources acquire their meaning within shared (albeit often contested!) symbolic frameworks, often converted through institutions that legitimize certain forms of recognition.

Framed in those terms, the relationship between status and the social is more difficult to analytically disentangle. For where it has become a commonplace observation in the status literature that status is social (William C. Wohlforth et al. “Moral authority and status in International Relations,” Review of International Studies, 44(3), 2019; Jorg Kustermans et al., “Whose Revisionism, Which International Order?” Global Studies Quarterly, 3(1), 2023) for the simple fact that in its most basic sense, status entails a hierarchy and therefore also a plurality of ranked actors who in some way or another entertain regular relations. Subotić and Kalaycioglu push the point further. If social orders are structured through hierarchies of recognition, then status is more than one of many features of social relations. Status becomes the key organizing principle of the social order, and the social order itself may, in fact, fundamentally be about status.

Considered in dialogue, these two books suggest that the literature on status is still analytically incomplete. There is a possibility that status may, in fact, not be merely one concern among others within international relations, such as security and wealth, but a constitutive feature of them. For, as both authors show in the case of the politics of culture, once the importance of recognition takes front stage, it becomes difficult to speak of “the social” in international relations without at the same time speaking about status. If social relations require mutual recognition, then standing cannot be separated from social interaction itself. The point that the social in international relations may, at least in part, be reducible to status may at first glance seem banal. However, it is a far more significant proposition than the fact that states routinely pursue status and that, therefore, status matters. While a lot of work has been put into demonstrating that status matters, even to “high politics,” conceiving of status as inherent to the social dimension of international relations may in fact render the distinction between “high” and “low” politics untenable.

Although beyond the scope of an essay such as this one, the fact that status concerns thus emerge as more than one driver among others invites a reconsideration of international relations as a social field in which states continuously seek recognition and symbolic distinction. This politics of status through which states claim and negotiate their international position is not limited to cultural artifacts or heritage sites, but can also be seen to include such symbolic markers as institutional membership, diplomatic protocol, gift giving to name but a few (Jorg Kustermans, “Gift-giving as a Source of International Authority,” The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 12(3), 2019). As Subotić and Kalaycioglu highlight, the pursuit of standing is far from an incidental feature of international relations, as it is constitutive of social interaction itself. Pushing the argument one step further, it is tempting to extend the claim that the status-seeking discussed here is not ornamental but existential to states by drawing on poststructuralist insights about states’ need to continuously perform their identity (e.g., Richard Devetak, “Incomplete States” in Boundaries in Question, 1995). As foreign policy must be constantly enacted and reproduced, the pursuit of recognition, symbols, and membership all become central to this ongoing performance. In that sense, where stasis is death, status is life.