Reputation and Status as Motives for War

Abstract

Justifications for war often invoke reputational or social aspirations: the need to protect national honor, status, reputation for resolve, credibility, and respect. Studies of these motives struggle with a variety of challenges: their primary empirical manifestation consists of beliefs, agents have incentives to misrepresent these beliefs, their logic is context-specific, and they meld intrinsic and instrumental motives. To help overcome these challenges, this review offers a general conceptual framework that integrates their strategic, cultural, and psychological logics. We summarize important findings and open questions, including: (1) whether leaders care about their reputations and status, (2) how to address the tension between instrumental and intrinsic motives, (3) whether observers draw inferences, (4) to whom and to what contextual breadth these inferences apply, and (5) how these relate to domestic audiences costs. Many important, tractable questions remain for future studies to answer.