Fighting for Status investigates how status concerns affect states' decisions in the domain of international security. Ironically, while there is widespread agreement within the political science discipline and the foreign policy community that status matters, there exists relatively little in the way of focused research on how and when it does so. Thus, our understanding of status in international politics has been guided so far by intuition, not by evidence, and this has left us with a significant gap in our understanding of how status affects foreign policy behavior and international outcomes. Relying on the assumption that `status matters' has left us with no extant theory of variation in states' concern for status and little understanding of its specific implications for foreign policy or international conflict. What is needed --and what my research is designed to provide --is a systematic investigation into the ways in which the desire to increase or prevent the loss of status affects the behavior of states and leaders, especially as these concerns relate to the propensity for violent conflict.