Abstract
The phenomenon of misrecognition has been analysed under various angles by philosophy, political theory, sociology and lately also by international relations (IR). In IR, (mis)recognition is mainly understood as either status denial (i.e. denial of legal state recognition), inflated honor pretentions (including positive self-images, mythical narratives of the past, Great Power projections and so on), or as a denial of vital conditions necessary for identity, individuality, and freedom. There has been much theoretical work on the problem of inclusion/exclusion or the insider/outsider problem in IR and various empirical studies have shown that misrecognition can contribute to international conflict, international inequalities, (neo)colonialism, masculine domination, and limit the overall rationality of decision-making. However, what has been generally overlooked is the question of agency, the ‘who’ that is seeking and/or entitled to be an object and subject of recognition and how such exclusions and related pathologies result from forms of misrecognition. This introduction to Agentic Misrecognition in World Politics engages with some of the problems related to the question of (mis)recognition and agency in IR, the patterns of excluded recognition, and the normative conditions that pertain to these processes of (mis)recognition. It closes with a summation of the research articles and forum contributions to this volume.
Key messages
- •Social conflicts, inequalities, and ecological degradation are an expression of both materials interests and misrecognition.
- •Misrecognition reduces agency and distorting the mode of being and harm.
- •Explores how the (non-)attribution of agency participates in misrecognition in world politics.
- •Provides a synopsis of the research articles and forum in this special issue.
Introduction: Agentic misrecognition in world politics
Studies on recognition over recent decades suggest that social conflicts, inequalities or even the degradation of the ecosphere are not only a question of material interests but also an expression of misrecognition towards subjects and objects (Honneth, 1992; Ringmar, 1996; Markell, 2003; Lindemann and Ringmar, 2012; Brincat, 2015; Epstein et al, 2018; Murray, 2018). Indeed, when dominant social groups benefit from dominated social groups, they depreciate them at the same time as neglectable or less worthy. In world politics, representatives of great powers assert the right for spheres of influence, sometimes disregarding, for instance, the sovereign equality of states within these spheres. Similarly, as outlined by Honneth, colonised, racialised and working-class populations feel that their deprivation of material goods, such as power and wealth, is also normatively grounded in perceptions or feelings of exclusion and disrespect. In this respect, they seek to be better recognised (Honneth, 1992). At times, the process of finding self-worth through social struggles matters more for recognition than the result of these struggles.
A shared assumption of most recognition scholars is that actors must receive in order to be recognised. One of the most recalled frameworks is the trilogy of Axel Honneth: love, legal rights and achievement (or solidarity). Even critics of this recognition paradigm, such as Nancy Fraser, have focused on what actors must receive, insisting on the significance of redistribution and self-presentation. Other models, such as Charles Taylor’s (1994), likewise show how misrecognition can lead to a distortion in the mode of being and even psychological harm. Shared across all theories of recognition, then, is the central idea that agents obtain more or less visibility, status and respect through their interactions with others (Wolf, 2011). In world politics, the process of recognition is apparent at two levels, with state actors tending to have more visibility and prestige in international politics than non-state actors. The United Nations, with its pecking order (Pouliot, 2016), reflects recognition disparities between the permanent and rotating members of the Security Council. Pecking orders across borders, however, are also expressed at the individual level. The chance for a ‘civilian casualty’ to be mourned in international conflict depends very much on their nationality.
The nearly exclusive scholarly focus on what actors must receive to be recognised is important but ultimately one-sided. From a normative point of view, there is a risk of essentialisation: if groups claim the right to receive recognition for their identity, it is possible that members of its group become imprisoned in a community, while the concept of recognition, at least in its Hegelian version, refers to the intersubjective and thus relational aspect. It is impossible to exist ‘independently’ from others. Another normative issue concerns the implicit risk of framing those who simply receive it as an inferior or subordinate population, such as the humanitarian object. Finally, and perhaps more decisively, the exclusive emphasis on what actors must receive in order to be recognised does not shed light on why some actors are particularly misrecognised or the ideologies, material forces and power that lie behind such misrecognition. When actors do not receive certain goods, this is the expression of, but not the reason for, misrecognition. If actors realise that their deprivation of goods is linked to their stigmatised identity, they may try to change social groups.
This special issue, ‘Agentic misrecognition in world politics’, was premised on the notion that the understanding of mis(recognition) as something we can receive neglects or downplays the question of agency. Misrecognition can go hand in hand with ‘only receiving’ and thus agentic passivity. If actors simply receive gifts and cannot reciprocate, they will literally be ‘gifted’ (‘gift’ meaning poison in German) and thus disempowered (Caillé, 2007; Kowalski, 2011); this contrasts with Ramel’s (2024) account of benevolence as recognition in his contribution to this special issue. When international actors criticise Western paternalism, the conditionality of foreign aid, democratic proselytism or cultural uniformisation, they do not necessarily doubt the other’s good intentions but feel that they are less valued than their ‘helpers’. In the same vein, dominant social groups might attribute to dominated groups excessive agency to make the claim that their misery is self-induced. Thus, quite typically, so-called ‘developing countries’ are blamed for their ‘bad’ governance. Correspondingly, the same dominant social groups might attribute to themselves excessive agency when they refer to their success as the result of hard work. Also, dominant groups tend to minimise their agency when it comes to explaining harm, for instance, presenting poverty or war as a kind of human fatalism or tragedy.
While recent recognition debates have largely neglected the question of how agentic framings and practices participate in misrecognition, older works – ranging from Hegel to the first generation of the Frankfurt School en passant by Marcel Mauss (1950) and his famous study about ‘the gift’ – offer some interesting insights. This scholarship exercises much attention to the place of agency and considers (mis)recognition as an intersubjective phenomenon mediated by agency over objects. For instance, in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic or Marx’s writings on alienation, the possibility for ‘subjectivation’ (self-consciousness) depends on the ability of subjects to exteriorise themselves in objects (vergegenständlichen). Thus, in the examination of how agentic framings contribute to misrecognition, we might ask how agency is distributed in intersubjective relations. To offer a much-cited example, while the relation between individuals or states, legally speaking, is formally based on the principle of equality, individuals or states dispose of significantly more productive and destructive means, which makes an important difference between them. Often implicitly, when we value subjects for their social contribution, we abstract from their material conditions. The inclusion of objects in agentic misrecognition not only hints at the ‘materiality’ of misrecognition but also refers classically to the fact that subordinated subjects, such as industrial workers, are not able to materialise in their objects. In order to understand misrecognition, we must interrogate the extent to which actors are able to exteriorise themselves in the material world. While objectivation refers in the Marxian tradition to the (im)possibility of workers to recognise themselves in their products (Marx, 2008), it may refer in world politics to the ability of subjects to exert agency through their participation in the creation of international norms and institutions, or, more generally, to take part in the global production and diffusion of ideas and goods.
Thus, this special issue focuses our attention on what has been largely neglected in the (mis)recognition debates so far: how the (non-)attribution of agency participates in misrecognition. In this introduction, we will first present how agentic aspects can be conceptualised in the study of misrecognition. In the second section, we will draw attention to how agentic misrecognition can function as an ideology of domination and how agentic self-representations fuel or inhibit experiences of misrecognition. Finally, we will present an outline of the articles in this special issue and their important contributions to these debates.
Conceptualising agentic misrecognition
Most authors in this special issue define misrecognition as a continuum whereby subjects receive visibility and value within a given social group or global society. Rather than some absolutist philosophical perspective, this tends towards a more sociological approach that emphasises degrees of misrecognition. The equal distribution of attention and value among subjects is a fiction, such as the norm of equal rights or mutual respect for sovereignty. In world politics, gaps in (mis)recognition are particularly pronounced. To offer one revealing example: the visibility and value accorded to the 3,000 people killed in New York in the context of the attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) are far higher in Western media than the 5 million people killed in the second war of the ex-Republic of Congo in 1998 (Butler, 2004).
We must distinguish between objectified misrecognition and the experience of misrecognition. Indeed, it is possible that actors who occupy a subordinated or ‘pariah’ place in society do not consider themselves as misrecognised because they have interiorised their presumed inferiority (Bourdieu, 1979). Similarly, dominant groups or state actors often claim that they have not received the respect they deserve (Wolf, 2011) – and this is a common finding among many of the articles in this special issue. Thus, the experience of misrecognition must be understood as a gap between what actors claim for recognition and what they believe they deserve to receive from others as recognition. This equation suggests that powerful actors often consider that they are misrecognised; for instance, US or Russian leaders might complain that others are ungrateful for their contribution (Lebow, 2008).
This ‘contributive agency’ counts a lot in the legitimation and experience of misrecognition. For instance, the professional value of an individual will not be recognised if it is considered that their position is only due to good relations with those high up. Similarly, the value of an actor in world politics is often due to their effective agency (such as their use of power) and attributed past achievements. The more an actor is conceived as powerful and contributing positively to society, the more they will receive recognition. We define here contributive agency as the (attributed) ability of subjects to influence society positively or negatively – in other words, to give something valuable/poisonous to society (Lindemann, 2018). Contributive agency can concern the past, present or the future. For instance, contemporary Germany must cope with its Nazi past, while leaders of ‘great’ powers often refer to their ‘civilisational contribution’, such as their promotion of democracy. Agency is attributed in framings and in practices. While framings refer to representations of agency, practices refer to what actors can do – in words and deeds – to shape social reality. Of course, frames are due to practices, and, in turn, practices are influenced by frames. Here, what is valued and how in terms of contribution brings in important questions of power, processes of (mis)recognition and the potential for domination.
Ideologies of agentic misrecognition
A much-discussed question in this special issue is how agentic framings participate in misrecognition and thus domination. One of the classical puzzles of critical theory was always to understand why oppressed social groups do not rebel against their servitude (Marcuse, 2013). Works that have referred to misrecognition mostly insist on the capitalist process of the fetishisation of commodities and reification. Capitalist societies would attribute personality to commodities while conceiving individuals as submitted to the iron law of capitalist competition. In this perspective of reification, individuals come to accept their domination because they believe that social structures are like natural forces and thus not susceptible to being transformed through social practices.
However, the thesis of misrecognition through reification has other sources than just capitalism. If we refer to the global norms of the contemporary international system, a strong vector of misrecognition through reification is the ideal of law – whether legal or scientific – which reduces humans to the means of enacting laws. Whenever decision makers explain why they must resort to force against another political entity, they almost always appeal to law (Fabry, 2010). To take just one example: the Bush administration declared that its war against Iraq was legally justified (Iraq was presented as a ‘rogue state’) and that it was grounded in scientific evidence (the so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction’).
The recurring reference in world politics to sovereignty as a guiding principle offers another perspective as to why the concept of reification does not exhaust the reality of agentic misrecognition. As mentioned, even modern capitalism in its neoliberal form exalts the creative hyper-subject in order to make the case that every person forges their own fortune (Bourdieu, 1979). Exalted (self-)presentations of sovereign agency in world politics are also driven by the tradition of ‘great’ power politics, with its cult of military power and the ideal of traditional masculinity (Enloe, 1990). In short, in order to capture misrecognition through agentic framings and practices, we must differentiate situations in which the agency of self and other is minimised from those where this agency is inflated.
Misrecognition through agentic minimisation: the reified other
A first variant of agentic misrecognition concerns the minimisation of the other’s agency and the often-corresponding maximisation of the self. Typically, international inequalities in wealth and power are justified through the essentialisation of ethnicity and the presentation of certain social groups as ‘naturally inferior’ (Nogueira, 2016). While the agency of such social groups is not entirely denied, their ability to act reasonably or scientifically is often questioned (Jackson, 2006). They seem to be condemned to dysfunctional behaviour. Thus, orientalised populations are objectified as irrational and savage (Bigo and Tsoukala, 2008; Duncombe, 2015). In the same vein, global poverty is often explained by ‘bad’ governance and/or incompetence, obscuring the ongoing practices of neocolonialism and the global economy. Classical political thought from Aristotle to Kant reserve epistemic agency for Western men. Women are often presented as passive even if it is meant positively, such as when military leaders claim the innocence of ‘women and children’.
Misrecognition through agentic minimisation can also take the form of attributed robotic behaviour, through which actors seem to act according to certain laws. While the other is not presented as passive (because they can ‘harm’), their behaviour is presented as one-dimensional, for instance, motivated by a quest for power and wealth, as incarnated in the famous homo economicus axiom (Caillé, 2007) or the Hobbesian subject (Curran, 2007). Another common presentation of the other is its presentation as a unified entity (Jervis, 1976). In mainstream international relations (IR) theory, individuals and social groups are unproblematically aggregated into states. This anthropomorphisation of states is completed by the assumption that these actors obey certain laws, for instance, conflictual behaviour in the case of power transition (that is, the ‘rise of China’ debate). However, the scaling up of recognition theory to states or national communities has been called into question by Honneth (2012: 33) because individual motives are too heterogeneous and diffuse to be sufficiently integrated.
The minimisation of agency does not necessarily produce the experience of misrecognition by those who suffer it. It is well known that dominated social groups often interiorise their presumed inferiority, a theme taken up in much of the postcolonial literature on recognition and evident in Daga and Gallagher’s (2024) contribution to this issue. In order to escape from this symbolic violence, oppressed people must rediscover their agency and relativise the agency of dominant groups – something that would be seen as prior to, but necessary for, the initiation of any struggle for recognition.
Misrecognition through agentic minimisation: delegation of responsibility
Another agentic figure in misrecognition concerns the minimisation of one’s agency related to causing harm. Dominant groups typically refer to inequalities as unfortunate realities that are non-intentional and exceptional. They are not seen as structural. In order to explain misery, they may refer to the ‘laws’ of the market to which actors must conform. Agency of the self is not entirely denied but presented as bounded by the ‘necessity’ to submit to legal or scientific laws. Similarly, actors that resort to violence often delegate their responsibility to higher laws to preserve a positive self-image. This might concern legal laws (the so-called ‘Responsibility to Protect’), laws of power transition that require preventive actions, laws of divine will (jihadist violence) or the so-called ‘necessity to defend the national interest’, often presented as something objective or even scientific despite its underlying metaphysical basis (see Pin-Fatt, 2005).
At the difference of the minimisation of the agency of the dominated other and thus the denial of their positive contribution to society, the self-minimisation of the agency of dominating actors often manifests in their irresponsibility in the production of harm (Schiff, 2014). If we ask ourselves what ideologies contribute to the minimisation of agency, it is difficult not to acknowledge the obsession with laws and scientific, expert-led governance, which may include classical references to the capitalist laws of the market and so-called ‘competitive constraints’, as well as references to cope with the laws of power dynamics and national interests. Political actors often refer to law to justify political decisions, whether juridical laws or scientific. The ambition to submit the world to the rule of law can also be seen as a variation of the ideal of sovereignty: the sovereign self dominates the world through objective knowledge (Epstein et al, 2018).
Arguably, misrecognition through references to law also permeates mainstream IR theory. We can observe at least four aspects of agentic misrecognition in the discipline of IR. A first aspect concerns actorhood and notably the invisibilisation of subjects through their aggregation in collective entities, as mentioned earlier. More often than not, this scholarship refers to states as if they were people. As classically outlined by the Aberystwyth School, this linguistic focus implicitly privileges state security over human security. Second, regarding relations to objects, mainstream IR theories often reify international structures and postulate that, for instance, globalisation or power transitions compel actors to behave in a determined manner. Third, for the sake of theoretical generalisation in the discipline of IR, an actor’s motivation is often reduced to utilitarian motifs, such as those of the homo economicus or homo politicus. As a result, social relations and social agency are reduced to their instrumental character (Ikaheimo, 2012). The fourth is the relative downplaying of the forms of misrecognition that result from the exclusionary nature of the state that distorts or denies the recognition of agents in the cosmopolitan sphere (Brincat, 2009; 2017).
Misrecognition through agentic maximisation: the fiction of the sovereign subject
Depending on the social context, misrecognition can also be expressed through the maximisation of agency. Thus, global inequalities of wealth and power are justified by the presumed freedom of countries and subjects that are considered responsible for their fortune. Neoliberal economists (as shown by Guéguen, 2024) often exalt individual responsibility, initiative and creativity. As inequalities are attributed to free choice, impoverished countries are rationalised as corrupt or even lazy. The ‘American Myth’ of the self-made man surmounting with tenacity every obstacle, from Benjamin Franklin to Rocky, has been largely globalised by the Hollywood movie industry (Chang, 2021).
The framing or assumption of an actor’s unity and autonomy may also favour conflict and violence. Thus, in inter-state relations, the assumption of sovereign agency may fuel perceptions or attributions of the ‘bad’ behaviour of other states (particularly enemies or rivals) as free will, instead of taking into account structural constraints or the heterogeneity inside the political entity. For instance, ‘China’s’ decision to increase its military budget is at times unproblematically presented as part of a grand dessein, such as the recovery of Taiwan or even world domination, whereas US arms expenditure is not given the same critical scrutiny. Thus, the fiction of the sovereign subject is a useful topos for the legitimation of inequalities and can induce cognitive biases in world politics than may fuel alarmism and indirectly war.
Misrecognition through agentic maximisation: hubristic sovereignty
In the academic literature, whether Taylor, Fraser or Honneth, resistances against misrecognition are often conceived in terms of emancipatory struggles. However, even dominant and powerful actors often claim to be misrecognised (Browning, 2019) – Donald Trump accused black prosecutors investigating him as ‘racist’, and Elon Musk tweeted that ‘he feels deeply offended’ by the Anti-Defamation League, ‘who push de facto anti-white racism’. Such accusations are useful to instil persecution mania, as exemplified in many fringe conspiracy discourses. Examples of powerful states being misrecognised are common in IR. Many of the contributors in this issue raise the example of contemporary Russia in this light (see Narozhna, 2024). We can observe such forms of thinking behind the allegations of anti-Semitism regarding any condemnation of Israel’s treatments of Palestinians. Such misrecognition also lay at the base of Trump’s calling out of unequal contributions in defence alliances and partnerships from Japan to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2017.
One of the best-known figures of (mis)recognition is the Hegelian ‘master’ (as self-consciousness) in Hegel’s (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. Most interpretations of the master–slave dialectic suggest that the master is striving to impose his self on the slave through his contempt for death, revealing his detachment and total sovereignty over his environment and other subjects (Hegel, 1977; 1991). Thus, far from being animated by the desire for equal rights or mutual recognition, the first Hegelian recognition struggle is about the desire to make out from the other the reflection of the absolute self. This struggle is self-defeating because of this lack of mutuality – and we find echoes of the impossibility to fill the intrinsic lack in self-identity in the articles by Murray (2024) and Kinnvall and Svensson (2024). Struggles for justice are much impregnated by expectations of justice that depend not only on feelings of self-worth but on self-image. Axel Honneth has alluded to such expectations as a ‘moral grammar’, but he excludes from this moral grammar inflated self-presentations, such as the will of being confirmed by the other in a position of superiority. However, if we want to capture all experiences of misrecognition, we must include hubristic self-conceptions as well (Lindemann, 2011). Such hubristic self-conceptions can be built on perceptions of superiority, for example, the very visible hegemonic ideal that resides in patriarchal notions of masculinity as being mentally and physically superior. Others are sustained by the desire for absolute sovereignty. For example, great powers are still largely defined by their military agency, as exemplified by the possession of nuclear weapons, with their capacity to destroy humankind at the click of a button, implying total sovereignty. As such, experiences and claims of misrecognition have to be understood as the negative gap between a claimed self-image and what actors believe or expect to receive from others as confirmation of their self-image.
On another level, the illusion of equal sovereignty can serve to legitimise the unequal distribution of wealth and power as seemingly due to merit and thus deserved. Leaders of so-called ‘developed countries’ often attribute to the Global North epistemic superiority in this way. This can be seen in the extolling of the neoliberal orthodoxy of the Chicago (free markets) and Austrian Schools (methodological individualism) against nearly all other forms of macroeconomic management – despite the cyclical failings of such doctrines. Stahl’s (2024) article in this issue shows how such ideas contribute to ideological domination by institutionalising forms of structural misrecognition. Such feigned epistemic superiority also leads to the misrecognition of others who bear the costs of these failings, whether negative externalities placed on the environment or those placed on those subjects who are rendered highly vulnerable in the developing world. For example, after the economic crash of 2007 the Federal Reserve Bank, with its Nobel Prize-winner Bernanke, practised ‘monetary easing’ to enable the recovery of the US economy, though also causing a rise in food prices and thus hunger among impoverished populations, particularly in the Global South – this is discussed in Feldmann’s (2024) article in this special issue. Any objections against Bernanke’s politics were qualified as unfounded, irrational and going ‘against science’ (Feldmann, 2017).
Hubristic self-conceptions may also feed international violence. Newcomers in international politics, for instance, countries born in the context of war and decolonisation, such as Turkey, India or Ghana, often enact their sovereignty through the staging of a homogeneous nation (Bartelson, 1995; Zarakol, 2010; Adler-Nissen, 2014). This performance of the classical ‘one and indivisible’ nation is not without consequences for minority groups that might be assimilated, oppressed or even eliminated in the name of national unity – the struggle of the Kurds being one such example. These same processes lie at the heart of many Western states and their colonial-settler relations too, albeit rarely placed at the forefront of international scrutiny. We can think here of the myth of America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ or Australia’s ongoing denial of indigenous constitutional recognition in this context. The myth of a sovereign, homogeneous community (Kinnvall, 2007) also informs policing practices, such as the construction of walls at the American–Mexican border or the Israeli West Bank Barrier.
Inter-state wars are often informed by desire for sovereign agency. The Russian–Ukrainian war illustrates a kind of ‘sovereign identity’ dilemma. While NATO members and Ukraine stressed the right of ‘free nations’ to choose their alliances without meaningfully taking into account Russian security interests, such as the fear of encirclement, Russian leaders seemed to consider that Ukraine belongs to their zone of influence and thus benefited from limited sovereignty. It is also evident that Russian and Western leaders in the context of the 2022 Ukraine invasion staged ‘resoluteness’ in order to preserve their political legitimacy in the public eye. Without consideration for the performance of sovereign agency, it would be difficult to understand the repeated calls for European economic sanctions against Russia, which could hardly be expected to stop the war if one considers the application of sanctions in past conflicts, from Iraq to Libya. We could view the modern articulation of the Monroe Doctrine – or what Biden called ‘America’s Front Yard’ in 2022 – and the US rejection of any outside interference in its sphere of influence as another expression of this same dynamic.
The ideal of absolute state sovereignty is often accompanied by performances of masculinity, from Putin hunting shirtless and swimming in icy waters to Biden starting his mornings by weightlifting (for discussion of these elements, see Kinnvall and Svensson, 2024; Narozhna, 2024). Of course, it is easy for a social scientist to disqualify and mock these unintellectual practices. However, the same social scientist might also be inspired by the ideal of value-free sovereign research, claiming to be able to scrutinise neutrally their objects. Already at the time of Auguste Comte, this ‘science’ was considered as ‘virile’, as opposed to the emotional, receptive, influenceable attitude of women (De Beauvoir, 1962; Enloe, 1990).
Such reframing is a good segue into how oppressed social groups – manual labourers, women, racialised minority groups and decolonial peoples, among others – require the reframing of agency to be understood through the analytical framework of misrecognition. Erroneously, recognition is often conflated with identity politics, which leads to essentialisation and the neglect of redistribution issues related to power and wealth (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Emphasising the original Hegelian-Marxian version of recognition, in this special issue, we make the assumption that the integration of ‘agency’ can revive and reframe studies of recognition. First, recognition is not compatible with essentialisation. Intersubjectivity and agency require the ability to enact recognition. Many contemporary recognition demands from oppressed groups are formulated in these terms, indicating the power of frames of sovereignty among the dominated and the dominant (Fabry, 2010; Fehl and Kolliarkis, 2015; Erman, 2016). Indeed, the ideal of sovereignty favours the fragmentation of dominated groups, as illustrated by the competition of ‘victims’. Second, the recognition problematic does not divert from economic and political domination. Quite the contrary, agency and, thus, recognition are only possible with the end of economic exploitation and accordance of rights and esteem. Furthermore, as we have seen, exploitation is based on misrecognition ideologies that minimise or maximise agency according to the situation, such as in the figure of the autonomous, responsible employee who is at the same time submitted to competitive market forces. In this sense, we join Axel Honneth (Fraser and Honneth, 2003) when he affirms that social injustices and misrecognition must be thought together, notably by dissecting ideologies of misrecognition.
In this short overview, we have emphasised two figures of misrecognition: one of the sovereign subject; the other that stems from the so-called ‘universality of law’, whether legal or scientific (Rose, 2013). In both cases, the individual subject is decontextualised and either invisibilised/depreciated or unduly celebrated for accomplishments that owe much to their material/cultural capital. Beyond the demasking of the ideology behind such forms of misrecognition, an emancipatory approach to recognition would require that redistribution has to enable people to be master of the lives, which goes beyond paternalist empowerment (Nussbaum, 2001) to include the axiological ability to participate in the normative shaping of the global world.
Chapter synopsis
The issue is loosely ordered by beginning with more theoretically focused contributions that we think help ground the conceptual basis of the issue, before moving towards more empirical engagements in later articles. In a philosophically rich discussion, Titus Stahl (2024) provides a recognition-theoretic analysis of ideology to help answer the ponderous question of why disadvantaged groups do not resist misrecognition more forcefully. Part of this is not just lack of collective capacity (or ‘false consciousness’) but a constraint of their epistemic agency by ideological structures. This develops key ideas already well developed in Stahl’s other works, especially his highly influential Immanent Critique (Stahl, 2021). Stahl argues that if we are only free agents when recognised by others as having the agency to participate in shared social practices, then some ideologies (like neoliberalism) constitute forms of structural misrecognition of material and discursive social practices. Adapting the Marxist materialist ideology critique and hermeneutical injustice in what he calls an ‘expressivist’ approach, Stahl uncovers how socially shared concepts, practices and rules are the main components of ideology that expresses the viewpoint of the dominant group and ‘hides’ this function, making it difficult to question the dominant viewpoint. Ideology, like ‘social invisibility’, works in such ways that agents who enforce these rules do not intentionally produce the disrespect or denigration of subordinate groups. Rather, the pathologies result from structural forces that subordinate experience as a social evaluation of who they are. Many social struggles involve attempts to make other people understand the need for revising these dominant concepts and rules. However, dominant discourses – like neoliberalism – can survive and even co-opt such forms of contestation as long as the underlying material practices remain unchanged. For Stahl, neoliberalism makes it difficult for individuals to challenge, leading to social suffering and struggles for recognition that are then prone to other regressive ideologies. The argument of the article has massive implications for how critical theory continues to think through recognition and ongoing practices of resistance to domination in the global economy.
Frédéric Ramel (2024) provides a theoretically novel article by taking up the Scottish tradition of moral sense to look at practices of benevolence as a source of social agency that takes into account respect towards others. Drawing from his earlier La Bienveillance dans les Relations Internationales (Ramel, 2022), Ramel defines actions of benevolence as negative (non-harm) and positive (such as rescue and promotion of the common good). In distinction to approaches that reduce benevolence to self-interest (rationalist) or an ‘artificial mask’ (realists), or as part of leadership stabilisation (liberalism), Ramel illustrates how benevolence is a strong and genuine recognition process. After a detailed excurses into the different accounts of benevolence between various theories of IR, Ramel’s article takes the interesting turn to the Scottish Aufklärung, in which benevolence was seen not as a mere selfish calculation but as part of the controversy between interest and sympathy. This bridges benevolence and recognition because benevolence means recognising the autonomy of otherness, that is, their capacity to act, and helping others implies a recognition of vulnerability and reciprocity. The second part of the article engages with many examples of what Ramel calls ‘benevolence as recognition’, and the third part explores benevolent conduct and agency. Ramel’s closing comments on the need to foster a benevolent disposition towards others is a particularly poignant suggestion for our ‘common milieu’ in the crises of world order today. Ramel’s suggestion that benevolence can even be a ‘lever’ for extending membership beyond a singular group via interdependences is an important idea for the potential extension of recognition in our global world.
Turning to questions of state agency, Michelle Murray (2024) engages with the problem of how states cope with the possibility that their self-understanding may not be recognised and the ontological insecurity this may generate. According to Murray, states must be able to act in ways that are consistent with their self-understanding, that state identities must be sustained in practice and that state identity formation is intrinsically connected to the state’s capacity for agentic behaviour. When a state is recognised in these ways, its identity is brought into existence and it is able to act in the international sphere in ways that it hopes are consistent with its self-understanding. As a process reliant on the other, the potential experience of misrecognition is an ineliminable feature in world politics – and a profoundly destabilising one at that. To minimise this possibility, Murray shows that states take on a range of strategies, including using social norms to guide behaviour, maintaining routinised relations and anchoring identities to the material world. In these ways, she posits that states exercise agency in the uncertain space between a claim to identity and the recognition response of others by creating the ‘illusion’ of an independent identity that is expressive of what they seek. Using France as an example of frustrated agency via its exclusion as a great power in the construction of the post-Second World War international world order, Murray argues that its development of a nuclear capability was such an illusory process. Examining the history of this period, Murray finds that de Gaulle believed that both symbolic behaviour and to be seen to be acting like a great power were satisfied by gaining a nuclear capacity, creating an illusion of independence to ensure French greatness on the world stage. Murray’s article raises many important questions about other aspects of how France attempted to gain recognition at the time by projecting its imperial violence in Vietnam or Algeria and thus denigrating the recognition of other peoples.
Moudwe Daga and Julia Gallagher (2024) contend with how recognition is established under the terms of dominant states that reproduce structures of colonial domination in world politics. The article is a remarkable blend of empirical research based on fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020 and theoretical insights enriched by deploying Frantz Fanon’s account of ‘speaking proper French’. Fanon’s concept is shown to be an example of misrecognition because such attempts serve to merely emulate the other rather than speaking for oneself (that is, ‘identity alienation’). Undertaking such actions leads the colonised to be the substitute or ‘ersatz’ agent of the coloniser – a form of subjection. Daga and Gallagher describe how the agency of post-colonial states is often limited in such ways, that is, how they become focused on emulation rather than self-directed or on intentional substantive recognition. Exploring the postcolonial francophone African states of Chad and Côte d’Ivoire – and how they chose to appear to others and the things they have chosen to do in relation to others – Daga and Gallagher show how the agency of these states remains constrained by their former colonisation. Chad framed its military intervention in Mali in 2013 within a discourse of humanitarianism, a narrative of intervention within liberal-Western terms. Côte d’Ivoire’s state-building programme, in turn, was a bid for recognition as an active agent through monuments and architecture in ways described in comparison to, and as an emulation of, the West. Their research hints at the anxiety this provokes within these peoples that the recognition gained is hollow or a masquerade. Ultimately, Daga and Gallagher argue alongside Fanon that true liberation can come only by dismantling the social categories of the structures of domination, so that all peoples see themselves, and are seen by all, as ‘distinct contributors to humanity’.
Tanya Narozhna (2024) explores an often-neglected part of state recognition/misrecognition: the centrality of gender. Her article offers a compelling discussion of how recognition is reliant on gendered and unequal social status and differential capacities, and how recognition dynamics are implicated in sustaining hierarchical, status-based stratification in world politics. Defining misrecognition as a ‘withholding of an external validation of the unique self-description and status desired by a state’, Narozhna shows how recognition practices elevate states with significant productive power into the ‘masculine’ position of authority, further empowering their epistemic agency and allowing them to prescribe appropriate norms/behaviour on others. In contrast, misrecognised states are demoted to a ‘feminised’ position of subjection. This perpetuates systemic inequality, and in this logic, conflict – or struggle – has the potential of transforming feminised/emasculated states into masculine agents. The contemporary Russian Federation is cast in this light; its misrecognition in world order is shown to be an act of emasculation for its elites and leadership. The humiliating experiences of the 1990s and 2000s have seen it pursue an explicitly masculine foreign policy – indeed, a hypermasculinist one that inflates norms/behaviours associated with men – to emphasise its autonomy and assert its identity in the world order. In this way, Narozhna shows how Russia’s general opposition to human rights over the last two decades, and its specific opposition to the rights of sexual and gender minorities, is part of its struggle for recognition on Russia’s terms and to reassert its epistemic agency abroad. This comes at great cost in structural, social and physical violence against these minority groups. The implications of Narozhna’s article are far-reaching, highlighting how much further research can be done in exploring how other state and civil society institutions – in this case, the Orthodox Church – can help buttress claims for external recognition. It also raises questions about how gender is central to international (mis)recognition in other contexts and the need to elevate the feminist emphasis on the importance of enabling agency through relational autonomy in recognition practices.
Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson (2024) build on similar thematics of gender found in Narozhna’s article and even share a similar case study. However, Kinnvall and Svensson draw together the psychoanalytic approach of Lacan (especially his idea of sublimation and psychic lack) and various findings from ontological security literature, perceiving a ‘hunger for certainty’ and wholeness as the core expressions of misrecognised agentic desire in Russia and India. Examining the stories of those who speak in the name of these states, Kinnvall and Svensson identify gendered, masculinist, phantasmatic pasts and active strongmen politics lying behind the desire in Russia and India to reconstruct, via neocolonial agentic actions, a homogeneous nation or empire. Empire is used to bring about a lost object (past ‘power’, ‘glory’ or ‘civilisation’, however imagined) to regain a wholeness to the categorical identity of these starts. However, the constitutive lack that propels such ‘postcolonial melancholia’ ultimately strives for a fullness that is unobtainable, and Lacan’s idea of sublimation shows how such actions are attempts to cover up this ‘impenetrable void’. Russia imagines its empire as a cradle of civilisation and beacon of traditional values against a sense of inferiority with the West. India rationalises a masculine Hinduism against a sense of vulnerability, especially from British colonial understandings of the effeminate Hindu man and the fear of dislocation by a Muslim population. The implications of the article are far-reaching. First, it posits a continuum of ‘state sovereignty’ with ‘imperialist’ and ‘colonising’ practices. Second, it reveals a link between misrecognition, masculinity and agentic action behind the state’s intrinsic inability to totalise ideas of ‘the self’ at the heart of ‘sovereign agency’. The question their research seems to pose is whether this agential ‘lack’, in the Lacanian sense, applies to all states: do all states manifest this ‘desire’ for empire? And if the lack can never be fulfilled, then what pathologies will inevitably arise from it in the international order?
Closing the special issue is John D. Feldmann’s (2024) article, which is arguably one of the first to explore recognition patterns within the global monetary system. The insights are both unique and compelling. Broadly, Feldmann uses the framework of agentic misrecognition to explore the institutional dynamics and forms of agency in the global monetary system and the specific context of the turmoil following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Feldmann focuses on the dispute between members of the monetary regime: the US Federal Reserve (the ‘Fed’), on the one side, and the ‘emerging market economies’ (EMEs) and their allies, on the other. Key insights are made into the socio-psychological profile of the Fed, the structure of the embedded misrecognition within the global monetary system and how the Fed benefits from its ‘self-misrecognition scheme’ to control and manage the monetary arena to its advantage. The article is as complex as it is thorough. It begins with a historical examination of the structure of misrecognition built into the hierarchical monetary system since Bretton Woods (in 1944), in which the US was idealistically premised as a benign hegemon, exemplar and rules enforcer of a body with formally autonomous and equal yet subordinate members with shared currency principles. It shows how many of the roles of the Fed were jettisoned before the GFC, however. Feldmann explores a range of critics of the Fed, especially focused on its expansionary monetary policy, which generated significant externalities for the rest of the world but that it failed to take account of, let alone mitigate. Feldmann then unpacks many of Fed Chief Ben Bernanke’s claims, especially in his ‘Federal reserve policy in an international context’ (Bernanke, 2015). In his model, Bernanke sees the US as setting the interest rate and all others having ‘no choice but to take the resulting state of affairs as a given’ – clearly identifying a form of agentic misrecognition permeating the entire scheme. For Feldmann, subordinate members in the global monetary system have, in effect, been ‘voluntarily colonised’ by this methodological and conceptual model. Feldman shows how the position of the Fed here reflects a Hobbesian mindset, leading to hegemonic and neo-imperialist actions. In the final parts of the article, Feldmann unpacks five key features of the Fed’s misrecognition scheme, showing it to be a cognitive dysfunction. The implications of the Fed’s ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ are especially worrisome – the Fed’s misrecognition model that leads it to overlook harms it is causing in the global economy continues within the institution’s structure. As such, there is no changed or improved recognition patterns to prevent or ameliorate its effects during the next, inevitable monetary crisis.
Forum synopsis
The special issue ends with a forum that explores the probing question: to what extent does the consideration of agency contribute to enrich the debate on recognition/misrecognition in social philosophy and IR? The responses are diverse and cover a range of contemporary and theoretical issues, including: the War in Ukraine; the pathologies of neoliberalism; reflections on the comparison of individual and state agency; and the forms of recognition and denial that can take place in IR. The participants include Richard Ned Lebow, Heikki Ikäheimo, Regina Heller and Haud Guéguen.
Richard Ned Lebow (2024) offers many critical reflections about recognition/misrecognition and agency, alongside observations on the contributions to this special issue as a whole. Lebow emphasises the implication of recognition with power, that is, recognition as the ability to maintain autonomy and misrecognition as powerlessness against the imposition of authority, values and practices. This directs our attention to how power is not just material and the importance of how international society confers recognition, respect and agency within its social structure. Recognition requires participation in valued social practices, and thus institutions of recognition both enable and constrict agency. We can have both illusions of agency and forms of exclusion from it, for example, how terms like ‘underdeveloped’, ‘Third World’ and ‘ex-colony’ constitute deliberate forms of misrecognition (a point that links with Daga and Gallagher’s [2024] argument especially). Lebow finds that the problem of agency is more acute for states given their difference in capabilities, the limitations around expressing agency and choosing self-identifications, the exclusionary nature of international society, and the fact that states do not constitute an ‘I’ but, rather, institutions on which people attempt to impose identities. Lebow concludes with two thoughts about how deviancy may be a response to misrecognition in IR and how we are observing an increasing sense of loss of agency by states in contemporary IR.
Heikki Ikäheimo (2024) directly engages with forms of agency in IR that can be recognised or unrecognised, what it means to have this agency recognised, and how the denial of this agency can come in a variety of ways in IR. Based on his work in Recognition and the Human Life-Form – Beyond Identity and Difference (Ikäheimo, 2022), Ikäheimo distinguishes between (1) epistemic agency, (2) normative agency and (3) practical agency, and explores how they intertwine towards one’s full realisation or freedom. This resonates with many of the articles in the special issue, especially Stahl’s (2024) use of similar concepts. Recognition, in turn, can mean anything, including passive awareness, inclusion or membership status, and concern for well-being. There is also a lack of recognition of agency, that is, a ‘denial’ of agency, which Ikäheimo shows can come in a variety of ways: denial can be generalised or be case specific; denial can be invisible/concealed or come in the form of explicit rejection/exclusion; denial can be made sincerely or for strategic ends; and denial can be self-directed (that is, a lack of awareness of agency or belief that it has been misrecognised or denied) or other-directed (that is, to inculcate a sense of rejection, disrespect or passivity in the other). Many of the articles in this special issue speak to these various forms of denial and the dramatic effect they can have for individual states and world politics as a whole.
Regina Heller (2024) shows how the perspective of agentic misrecognition helps turns analytical attention to the constructed and subjective realities of actors in international relations. After problematising many other explanations of the Russia–Ukraine War as something driven by international structure, great power rivalry or regime structure arguments, she posits the conflict as the result of a contingent process between the recognition expectations of Russia and the relational dynamics between it and the West. Here, there are close ties with arguments made elsewhere in the special issue by Narozhna (2024) and Kinnvall and Svensson (2024). According to Heller, the main drivers of the conflict are Russia’s desire to overcomes its ‘marginalisation’ and ‘status degradation’ – forms of misrecognition. Viewed in this light, the war is a defence of both Russia’s position in the international system and its social esteem, associated with its interiorised social identity as a great power.
Haud Guéguen (2024) explores the new regime of recognition in neoliberal society as a form of domination. Reading across a number of recognition theorists, from French post-war philosophy and Honneth especially, recognition is viewed as a condition of ‘frames’ that provide the possibility for recognition if individuals condition themselves to their interpellation. These ‘frames’ always invite conformity to some standard of identity, the absence of which can lead to invisibility, rejection or even social death. This link between recognition and domination provides Guéguen with an acute sense of how neoliberal ideology operates today – making many parallels with the ideas presented in this special issue by Stahl (2024) and Feldmann (2024). According to Guéguen, the neoliberal regime of recognition is based on the fiction of the omnipotence of individuals, or the illusion of ‘hyper-agency’. This fiction then presides over the mechanisms for evaluating individuals, especially in the private sphere. The form of recognition is reduced to, or even colonised by, a neoliberal grammar, that is, recognition adopts market and corporate norms: we become consumers and entrepreneurs. This inverts the demand for authenticity and self-realisation. Worryingly, this means that there is a radical vulnerability for all individuals across our globalised neoliberal economy in world politics.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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