Hate to lose more than love to win: relational status decline and interstate conflict

Abstract Despite extensive scholarly attention to the relationship between status concerns and interstate conflict, no clear consensus has emerged. This is partly due to persistent theoretical and methodological limitations. Most existing research has focused almost exclusively on status inconsistency—a mismatch between a state’s material capabilities and the recognition it receives—as the primary source of dissatisfaction, thereby overlooking alternative pathways. Drawing on insights from psychology and sociology, I argue that status concerns arise not only from such mismatches; they may also emerge when states perceive their standing to be deteriorating over time. I focus in particular on relational status decline, defined as a state’s decreasing embeddedness across multiple, compositionally distinct communities within diplomatic networks. States undergoing such relational decline are more likely to take risks and initiate conflict. To capture these dynamics, I employ a novel link-based community detection method that moves beyond traditional approaches by identifying multiple, potentially overlapping status reference communities. This empirical innovation captures the relational and multilayered nature of international recognition, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of a state’s position in the global hierarchy. Analyzing nearly 200 years of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), I find that relational status decline significantly increases the likelihood of conflict initiation.