The Grammar of Status Competition - International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics

States do not only strive for wealth and security, but international status too. A burgeoning body of research has documented that states of all sizes spend considerable time, energy, and even blood and treasure when seeking status on the world stage. Yet, for all scholars'' success in identifying instances of status seeking, they lack agreement on the nature of the international hierarchies that states are said to compete within. Making sense of this status ambiguity remains the key methodological and theoretical challenge facing status research in international relations scholarship. In The Grammar of Status Competition, Paul David Beaumont tackles this puzzle head on by making a strength out of status'' widely acknowledged slipperiness. Given that states, statesmen, and citizens care about and pursue status despite its difficulty to assess, Beaumont argues that we can study international status hierarchies through these actors'' attempts to grapple with this same status ambiguity. T