ABSTRACT
In the modern, liberal international order, non-Western states have pursued status and self-esteem within Western-dominated normative hierarchies. States’ strategy for the pursuit of self-esteem took different forms depending on the position the state occupied in the international order as well as on the strength and credibility of the international order. The search for self-esteem led non-Western elites to define their countries’ national identity in a certain way, which generated corresponding conceptions of national interest. When international order was stable, non-Western states acted within its confines, but when the order weakens, they sometimes sought to reconstruct the international order itself.
