This chapter discusses IST itself as well as the research design of the book. It provides a detailed exposition of the key variables of the theory: the status-seeking strategies of rising powers, institutional openness, and procedural fairness. It discusses the causal mechanism that explains the impact of openness and fairness on a rising power’s status and corresponding choice of strategy. It generates four possible strategies a state may follow: cooperate, challenge, expand, and reframe. On research design, the chapter describes the scope conditions of the theory, definitions of key concepts, case selection, research methodology and sources, and the observable implications of the theory and how they differ from the observable implications of alternative (materialist) explanations.

The putative crisis of international law, today as in other eras, is inseparable from its own production of crisis. Because international law derives much of its legitimacy from its claim to address, manage, and resolve crises, traditional approaches to international law see it as the solution, not the problem. When international law is unable to respond effectively to crisis, it is often seen as “in crisis.”

What receives much less attention than international law’s failure to resolve crisis is the related role that international law plays in the production of the very crises to which it responds. We consider that production here in the context of feminist approaches to international law. We are particularly interested in the role of dominant feminist approaches in the production and maintenance of crisis through their successful calls for international legal action.

The practice of interpretation brings the law to life. It takes part in shaping and making the law, and does not just give effect to the law that is out there. To the extent that international law affects peoples’ everyday life, so does the practice of interpretation. Even more so than other fields of law, international law is in large parts the product of interpretative practice. What then is this practice of interpretation?

Interpretation is best understood as an argument about what the law means. While such an understanding of interpretation enjoys considerable common ground, it immediately begs the question of how to then understand that practice of arguing. I will distinguish four different approaches to that question in light of their strategy of critique – whether that critique is formalist, instrumentalist, realist, or immanent. In other words, what are the arguments and broader strategies with which to criticize a specific interpretation or a broader interpretative practice? This question will provide the pathway for approaching the practice of interpretation.

There was an extensive epistemic community in historical East Asia that was central to the creation and dissemination of regional civilization that flowed mainly from China outwards, from core to periphery. This epistemic community was composed of Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars. They studied at Buddhist temples and Confucian academies, wrote in a common Chinese language using common styles, and made up the bulk of government officials in each country. These scholar-officials were also the ones who staffed diplomatic missions to other countries. This chapter will discuss in detail the flows of monks and literati between the various countries, and trace the influence of this transnational scholarly and religious community on the evolution of societies – as well as state formation – throughout the region.

This chapter recapitulates IST’s central assumptions and predictions, as well as the findings from the case studies. It identifies a number of empirical patterns emerging from the cases, which suggest areas for future research. The chapter also identifies alternative methodologies for testing IST and concludes with a discussion of IST’s implications for theories of power shifts and international order. Finally, it discusses the policy implications of IST for the future of the liberal international order.

This chapter lays down the conceptual foundations of Institutional Status Theory. It situates IST in the literature on status in world politics, and on social identity in particular. It elaborates on the concept of status as an intrinsic value and as a role that entails symbolic equality with higher-status actors, as distinct from status as a set of valued attributes. It discusses the psychological and social foundations of IST, in particular its relationship to and difference from constructivist theory. Finally, the chapter theorizes the great-power club and international institutions as sites of status struggles.

Vietnam’s experience in the tenth and eleventh centuries was remarkably similar to that of Korea and Japan. The adoption of Confucian traditions as preferred modes of governance, in particular, reflected strong state bureaucratic practices that made Vietnam stand out from its neighbors in continental Southeast Asia. By 973 the Vietnamese state had been recognized as a Song tributary, and within a century, the Vietnamese state had created centralized provinces, founded a Royal Confucian Academy, used Chinese in all its writings, implemented a national tax, and created a national military based on universal conscription. By 1075, the Vietnamese court had instituted civil service examinations based on Chinese Confucian classics. The civil service examination would be used for the next nine hundred years, and it was only the arrival of French imperialists that transformed the government. Confucianism penetrated to the level of economic and family organization at the village level, affecting patrilineal inheritance and even dress. Vietnamese retained their indigenous language for unofficial uses, and indigenous social and religious customs, chief among them Buddhism.