Vicarious Identity in International Relations

Abstract

Abstract This book theorizes and problematizes the politics of vicarious identity in international relations, where vicarious identity refers to processes of “living through the other.” While prevalent and recognized in family and social settings, the presence and significance of vicarious identification in international relations has been overlooked. Vicarious identification offers the prospect of bolstering narratives of self-identity and appropriating a sense of reflected glory and enhanced self-esteem, but insofar as it may mask and be a response to emergent anxieties, inadequacies, and weaknesses it also entails vulnerabilities. The book explores both its attraction and potential pitfalls, theorizing these in the context of emerging literatures on ontological security, status, and self-esteem, highlighting both its constitutive practices and normative limits and providing a methodological grounding for identifying and studying the phenomenon in world politics. Vicarious identification and vicarious identity promotion are shown to be politically salient and efficacious across a range of scales, from the international politics of the everyday evident, for instance, in practices associated with (militarized) nationalism, through to interstate relations. In regard to this latter the book provides case analyses of vicarious identification in relations between the United States and Israel, the UK–US special relationship, and between Denmark and the United States, and it develops a framework for anticipating the conditions under which states may be more or less tempted into vicarious identification with others.

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