Rational Illusions: Everyday Theories of International Status and the Domestic Politics of Boer War

Existing research has documented that status-seeking abounds in world politics. Yet the status hierarchies to which states respond and compete within are notoriously ambiguous and difficult to empirically ascertain. This ambiguity has begotten considerable disagreement among scholars over the nature of international hierarchies. Making a strength out of this slipperiness, this article posits that international status can be studied via the everyday theories of status that governments and their opponents themselves produce and use to interpret their state’s status. Treating these everyday theories as productive of the world they purport to describe, such an approach foregrounds the interpretative agency of domestic groups to develop and maintain “hierarchies of their own making,” which need not be recognized internationally to become crucial for policy legitimation domestically. In order to study such everyday theories’ systematically, the article develops a new meta-linguistic framework for identifying and mapping their use within domestic politics. Via a case study on the Boer War (1899–1902), the article shows how domestic battles over what international status is can shape domestic politics and policy outcomes.