Dilemmas of Divorce: How Secessionist Identities Cut Both Ways

This paper develops and illustrates a novel theoretical explanation for maximal revisionist challenges to the status quo. I argue that some rising great powers become dissatisfied with the normative and constitutive structure of the status quo and therefore incapable of or unwilling to orient themselves toward reassurance, not because of increasing capabilities but rather due to the domestic political effects produced by perceptions of status immobility—the idea that the status quo is unable to accommodate the rising state's claims to increased status and prestige. I illustrate the argument by showing that Japan's increasing revisionism after 1931 can in large part be explained by widespread perceptions of status immobility linked to Japanese understandings of the role of race in the maintenance of the Western-dominated status hierarchy.