Role Compatibility as Socialization: The Case of Pakistan (Role Theory and International Relations)

In Role Compatibility as Socialization, Dorothée Vandamme examines Pakistan’s socialization process in terms of role compatibility in the 2008-2018 period.

Adopting an Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) method of analysis, Vandamme builds on role theory to develop a theory of socialization as role compatibility to explain the dynamics of Pakistan’s (dys)functioning position and its status-seeking process as a fully functioning member of the international system. Specifically, she focuses on how Pakistani civilian and military leaders define their country’s positioning towards India, the United States and China. In doing so, she traces the link between domestic role contestation at the country’s inception and the resulting domination of the military’s conception of their country, state identity, how it projects itself externally and how it is received by others.

Departing from strictly structural or agent-oriented explanations, Vandamme expertly demonstrates Pakistan’s perceived role compatibility with significant others and underlines the causality between state identity, foreign policy behavior and socialization. Role Compatibility as Socialization will be of interest to graduate students and researchers who work on and with role theory and socialization theory, and for those with a research interest on South Asia.

Dorothée Vandamme is a lecturer at the University of Mons and a visiting lecturer at the Université catholigue de Louvain. She is a researcher at the ISPOLE institute and a research fellow at the European Foundation for South Asian Studies. Her main research interests are political sociology and social processes in interstate relations, the political and security environment in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Chinese foreign policy and contemporary international security issues.