Joshua Freedman

Recognition Matters: constructing and contesting the self in world politics

Political leaders often engage in open fights for recognition, announcing that some crucial element of their nation or state’s identity has not been properly acknowledged and respected in the conduct of diplomacy. Recognition campaigns of this sort have captured and undermined peace-negotiations, they have made reconciliation between adversaries more difficult and conflicts more entrenched, and they have been used to frame, defend, and oppose cooperation between states and international organizations.

Rather than explain these conflicts by defaulting to the premise that recognition intrinsically matters in a world governed by social insecurity and uncertainty, this book project asks a more critical question: why does recognition matter when it does? Why do some slights, humiliations, and omissions come and go without any observable reaction or incident, while others seem to take on a life of their own, fueling recognition conflicts? Why are some political elites so sensitive to recognition’s absence, and so motivated to convince their citizens of the need to acquire it, while others within the very same group or state dispute narratives of its absence, necessity, and significance? What, meanwhile, are the consequences of these conscious decisions to render recognition significant by fighting both international—and at times even domestic battles—to gain it? These are the central questions and puzzles that motivate this book.

While recognition is fundamentally a social phenomenon, the book argues that recognition conflicts cannot be reduced to a byproduct of social relations alone. Instead, the book shifts it's analytical lens away from the social structure of international politics, as the preeminent source of recognition conflict, and toward the agency of recognition-seeking actors themselves. It is this reversal which allows the book to identify and explain two competing attitudes: the incentives political leaders may have for promoting recognition conflicts, and the inclination others have for avoiding them.

The book is grounded in three empirically rich case studies unbounded by actor-type, issue area, and time period, but united in their illustration of the agency, choices, and contestation that so often lurks behind the struggle for recognition: (a) Israel’s insistence, since 2007, that it be recognized by Palestinians as a ‘Jewish state’ as part of any final status negotiations; (b) the Armenian diaspora’s long-standing demand that the world, and Turkey, recognize the 1915 massacres as genocide; and (c) the decisions of British elites on both sides of the Brexit referendum to make status-loss, real or imagined, a central feature of their campaigns for and against EU membership. 

For each case, the book details the causes and consequences of recognition conflict by drawing on a range of empirical sources: Israeli-Palestinian negotiations transcripts, American court proceedings on the Armenian genocide, Israeli and British newspapers, elite memoirs, and state archives in the United States. At each step, the book illustrates how actors mobilized for recognition not merely because it was an intrinsically desirable end point, but also because of tangible benefits attached to the rhetorical struggle for recognition itself. To varying degrees, each case also illustrates the harmful consequences attached to the active pursuit of recognition as the dependence on others’ views that recognition-seeking entails also bound each of these actors to their audience in fundamental ways.