  When it comes to the question of collective agents, there is still considerable uncertainty within the literature. In the following, this entry distinguishes between (i) groups, (ii) corporations or states and (iii) institutions more generally. (i) Most authors readily grant that (at least certain) groups of persons may be the subject and object of (mis)recognition because a group can share collective intentions as well as certain features for which it can be misrecognized (especially if these features constitute the group’s self-understanding). (ii) It is more contested whether more complex collective actors such as corporations or states—to the extent they are thought to have a legal personality—can be regarded as subjects and objects of recognition in the proper sense (see for the latter Rawls 1999, 34–35). For example, there is dissent about whether the acts of the “collective actor” are rather to be understood as resulting from the mere aggregation of individual intentions, thus signifying individual acts of (mis)recognition, or whether  they display genuinely autonomous collective intentions. Philip Pettit argues for the latter position by pointing out that in order to act reliably (internally and externally) a collective agent’s decisions have to display a certain coherence over time, which is achieved by procedures (Pettit 2007, 180). Recently, there have been attempts to introduce the notion of recognition into the field of International Relations, beyond the common usage of a legal recognition of states. Often enough, it is argued, the (violent) behavior of states cannot be reductively understood as a merely instrumental striving for ever more power but should (at least also) be perceived as a struggle for recognition (see the contributions in Lindemann/Ringmar 2011, O’Neill/Smith 2012, part III, and Daase et al. 2015). Certainly, citizens frequently speak as if their state was disrespected by another state but it remains to be seen whether these citizens are in fact merely indignant about their government being disrespected, some public official or they themselves as members of the state (in more detail Iser 2015, 30–34). (iii) Finally, what about institutions more generally? A lot depends on one’s definition of institutions, which can be part of a state (for example, a state’s constitution) or transcend state borders (as the institution of the free global market). Institutions cannot as easily be described as collective actors. Still, given that they are human products, there is broad agreement that an institution (say, a constitution) can disrespect persons because institutions, besides effectively regulating behavior, always express—as well as reinforce—underlying attitudes of those who designed or keep on reproducing them. In distinguishing between a civilized society where individuals do not humiliate each other and a decent society where at least the institutions do not do so, Avishai Margalit (1996, 1–2) explicitly affirms this point. Furthermore, political resistance as a moral endeavor would prove to be unintelligible if we did not assume that political institutions (and not only the agents acting within them) could be subjects of misrecognition. But can institutions themselves be disrespected? Institutions can certainly be disregarded but it may be argued that institutions (similar to values and norms) are either “acknowledged” or not whereas it is only persons or groups subject to these institutions who can be properly “(mis)recognized” as only here (mis)recognition has consequences for the object’s self-conception.