The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers.

• Author: Murray, Michelle

Will global power transitions be peaceful or bloody? This question frequently comes to the fore as to the consequences of the possible power transition between China and the USA. The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers provides both a theoretical and empirical framework based on the 'struggle for recognition' to understand the social dynamics of power transitions. Michelle Murray examines the rise of the United States and Germany against Britain at the end of the 19th century. Using these examples, Murray questions why some power transitions occurred peacefully and others ended in conflict. While Murray brings together status studies and power transition theory within the framework of 'constructivist theory', the epistemological foundation of her book is still based on positivism. She evaluates the relationship between identity, social uncertainty, and the material world from a Hegelian perspective, using the master-slave dialectic. This approach offers a different perspective on how states manage their intersubjective identities in anarchic social uncertainty. By contributing to the literature with this unique perspective, Murray offers a philosophical explanation of the process of individual identity formation to international relations theory.

The book consists of eight chapters. After explaining the aim, subject, main arguments, and plan of the book in the first chapter (Introduction: The Problem of Rising Powers in International Politics); the theoretical background is detailed in the second (The Struggle for Recognition: State Identity and the Problem of Social Uncertainty in International Politics) and third (The Social Construction of Revisionism: (Mis)Recognition and the Struggle for Major Power Status) chapters. In the fourth (Weltpolitik: The German Aspiration for World Power Status) and fifth (Recognition Refused: The Tragedy of German Naval Ambition before the First World War) chapters of the book, Murray examines how Germany's struggle for recognition, defined as taking its 'place in the sun' at the end of the 19th century, was built as a revisionist motivation due to its misrecognition. In the sixth (Looking Outward: The American Aspiration for World Power Status) and seventh (Recognition and Rapprochement: America's Peaceful Rise) chapters, she explains the peaceful rise of the USA to world power status in the early 20th century. In the last chapter (Conclusion: Rising...