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The Struggle for Recognition

This chapter clarifies the relationship between recognition and state identity formation in international anarchy, highlighting the effects of social uncertainty in this process. Acts of recognition are constructive of a state’s identity, providing it with the authority it needs to act in ways that are consistent with its self-understanding and endowing it with a recognized social status in the international order. This inherently social process of identity formation is deeply uncertain because states can never discern beforehand the recognition responses of other states and as a result state interaction is fraught with the danger of misrecognition. In response to this ongoing social uncertainty, states attempt to take independent control over the meaning of their identities by grounding them in concrete material practices. As an effective expression of an identity, the material world gives substance to the recognition-seeking state’s aspiring social identity and allows it to experience its social status as a brute fact, rather than as the uncertain effect of an ongoing political practice of social construction.