This chapter introduces a new framework that analyzes the role of timing and temporality in international institutions and world politics. It describes the temporal coordination dilemmas facing international actors. The chapter details the challenges posed by gradually accumulating incentives to alter international institutions and by the large number of actors that must be brought into the picture if institutional change efforts are to succeed. In realizing major change, a large array of moving pieces must be synchronized at one point in time, entailing considerable complexity and transaction costs. Indeed, the political and analytical investments – both international and domestic in nature – involved in recasting institutions are very substantial. Actors’ willingness to incur a sharp increase in transaction costs depends on their expectations that others will engage in a parallel effort. Thus, even as incentives to alter institutions mount, the inertial drift of institutional life persists until actors are able to reach a temporal convergence of expectations. At that time, actors make substantial investments in change processes and alter fundamentally their bargaining behavior.

This chapter introduces the central argument of the book: that China’s 21st- century transition from a “benefactor” to a “banker” has had far-reaching im- pacts in low-income and middle-income countries that are not yet widely understood. Beijing’s growing use of debt rather than aid to bankroll big-ticket infrastructure projects has created new opportunities for developing countries to achieve rapid socioeconomic gains, but it has also introduced major risks, including corruption, conflict, and environmental degradation. Some countries are more effective than others at managing these risks and rewards. This chapter “zooms in” on two countries—Sri Lanka and Tanzania—to illustrate the tension between efficacy and safety confronted by developing countries banking on Chinese development finance. It also provides a roadmap for the rest of the book.

I make the case that researchers should understand epistemology and its implications for their work. Provides an overvierw of subsequent chapters.

The meaning of authorship and how to deal with rejection.

In this chapter, I introduce the question that animates the book and preview the argument. Under what conditions does climate change lead to negative security outcomes? I emphasize the combination of weak state capacity, exclusive political institutions, and absent or one-sided delivery of international assistance. I then summarize the contribution of the book and preview the chapters, including the case studies.

This chapter traces the origins of International Relations (IR) scholarship from the outbreak of the First World War to the making of the peace. It follows a set of pioneering thinkers and pressure groups across Europe and the United States to demonstrate both the intellectual roots and the practical infrastructure of the emerging discipline. The chapter begins by reviewing the state of international affairs on the eve of the war which inspired a set of writings on economic interdependence and world order. The second section shows how the conflict itself prompted authors to reflect on the causes of war and the conditions for peace. The third section examines the intellectual preparation of the post-war order within an emerging community of IR experts. The final section reveals how the founders of IR contributed as government advisors to the Paris Peace Conference and, simultaneously, laid the institutional foundations of the discipline. As a result, this chapter concludes, the origins of IR were deeply intertwined with wartime events and inspired by the making, not just interpreting, of international politics.

This chapter advances a new and non-Eurocentric theoretical framework for understanding the concepts of 'sovereignty' and 'world order' in international relations. Before the West is focused on a particular type of sovereignty – labelled Chinggisid sovereignty – which was influential throughout parts of Asia from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuriess. This understanding of sovereignty was extremely centralised around the person of the ruler and was legitimated by the notion of world empire. The empire of Genghis Khan disseminated this sovereignty norm and its associated institutions across Asia. Before the West thus argues that Asia was dominated by world-ordering projects in this Chinggisid mould from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and their loss (as well the connections they facilitated) contributed to the perception of ‘the decline of the East’ from the seventeenth century onwards, even though Asia was not surpassed materially by the West until much later. This reconstructed grand narrative of the history of Asian International Relations also has significant implications for contemporary debates on crisis and decline.

Introduces the motivating questions of the book and discusses the concept of human rights as an international practice. What is the relationship of care to justice; how did human rights advocates develop important practices to advance justice; and why did anti-povery groups adopt rights-based language in development practice? My working hypothesis is that human rights advocates have developed a lasting set of tools for pursuing justice, amounting to a justice-seeking practice. Offers an overview of the book.

In this Introduction to the book, I raise the question of the possible erosion of prohibitions on assassination, torture, and mercenarism. I discuss the limits of ‘norm death’ as an explanation and propose instead that a ‘normative transformation’ has occurred. I outline how pragmatism, practice theory, and relational sociology will inform my perspective, how I will critique and build on theories of norm change in IR, and how I will analyse the three cases: the USA’s targeted killing programme, the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme, and the USA’s extensive employment of armed contractors in war zones.

The scholarly debate on the causes of the end of the Cold War has placed significant emphasis on the role of communist economic stagnation in bringing about the collapse of communism. This chapter brings a new material factor – communist sovereign debt – to the forefront, and in so doing, it offers a redefinition of the materialist explanation for the end of the Cold War. The global financial history of the end of the Cold War has four important implications. First, it makes the timing of the end of the Cold War far less contingent upon Gorbachev’s rise than previously thought. Second, it allows us to refine the causal connection between Soviet relative decline and the peaceful nature of the end of the Cold War. Third, global financial history transforms our understanding of Western leverage over the events that comprise the end of the Cold War. And fourth, the history of sovereign debt in the Eastern Bloc de-exceptionalizes the revolutions of 1989 in world history and places them within the context of broader global currents that continue to this day.

The worldwide exportation of the nation-state went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Western concept of religion, both of which are notably related to the expansion of the Westphalian order. Exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion intersects with two bodies of knowledge: nationalism and secularization. Combining them helps explain why and how religion and politics influence each other. Historical institutionalism and conceptual history are used to establish areas of politicization of religion in the qualitative phase of the research and to identify patterns in big data bases in the quantitative phase of the research. This approach is applied to the politicization of religion in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been an age of primacy marked by a series of conflicts for which powerful states have chosen to go to war over nonvital interests against much weaker state or nonstate actors. In these asymmetric conflicts, the powerful have coerced concessions, imposed regime change, and suppressed the spread of violence through counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations. Powerful nations have largely succeeded in achieving both their military and political objectives by taking advantage of asymmetries in technology to wage war from afar, at low risk to their own forces. War outcomes have not, however, always translated into broader foreign policy objectives of long-term peace and stability. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the evolution of air power theory, presents characteristics of contemporary air warfare and measures of military and political effectiveness, and then briefly assesses the ten air wars examined in subsequent chapters.

Complex governance aptly describes the nascent regulation of military and security services where a set of multi-stakeholder initiatives link action by national and international hierarchies with markets and networks around a common agenda. The regulation of small arms, however, follows more traditional forms – national hierarchies act with little coordination via one another, diametrically opposed networks battle to set the agenda, and markets are largely absent (though commercial money from arms flows through both national hierarchies and networks, market modes are not present in governance processes). Concomitant with these institutional configurations, effective governance, loosely defined as coordination of relevant actors, has progressed in military and security services but regressed in small arms. This chapter compares the evolution of governance in these two issue areas illustrating the interplay of structure and agency that yields change (or not) as well as more and less governance surrounding these two issues. It argues that while the “good enough” of complex governance may not be sufficient in some eyes, it is probably the best we can hope for and is far more likely to solve problems than forms that rely on top-down, commanding, and forceful measures alone.

This chapter explains why it is worth studying the thinking and practice of international relations and world order in three pre-modern civilizations. It argues that the end of the era of Western dominance is now happening, and these three cultures are becoming more powerful and influential in IR as the West declines. It is therefore important to know what they will bring to the table. IR grew up in the period of Western dominance but now needs to become more global in its sources.

Chapter 1 presents the motivation of the study, including empirical and theoretical puzzles about how foreign aid delivery varies markedly across donors and time. The chapter then reviews the relevant foreign aid literature. It outlines the approach to studying foreign aid delivery and briefly summarizes the theoretical argument as well as the empirical strategy used to test the theory. It describes the plan of the book.

This chapter elaborates the theoretical and methodological approach used in this book. Guided by Gramscian state theory, we trace the post-1978 rise of a powerful, though divided, cadre-capitalist class, and the associated, uneven and contested fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of China’s party-state. We then elaborate a theoretical model capable of explaining how policymaking and implementation work under these changed conditions: the Chinese-style regulatory state. In this model, rather than making detailed, binding decisions and strategies, top leaders try to loosely steer and coordinate a plethora of actors towards favoured ends. But other actors can influence, interpret and even ignore these policy frameworks. Chinese behaviours thus represent an ongoing struggle within the fractured party-state. Outcomes are further shaped by socio-political dynamics within the other countries in which Chinese actors operate. The chapter also explains our method and case selection, and canvasses and rejects some predictable objections to our argument: that China’s state transformation is nothing new, and that recentralisation under Xi Jinping has made the state transformation argument outdated.

This chapter presents the book’s research design and central argument. I begin by considering accounts of the ‘rise of the West’ that explain Western expansion through reference to European exceptionalism, global logics of uneven and combined development, or the facilitating role of local networks and patterns of collective identity in enabling colonial conquest. Having critiqued these accounts, I then advocate an alternative Eurasia-centric approach that stresses the vital parallels and interconnections between ‘barbarian’ Mughal, British and Manchu conquests in early modern South and East Asia. A combination of military, economic, cultural and administrative developments across Eurasia made it easier for ‘barbarians’ to conquer and preserve empires on a subcontinental scale. After 1500, formerly stigmatized outsiders from Eurasia’s steppe, sea and forest frontiers capitalized on these opportunities to carve out the empires that eventually crystallized into the modern post-imperial states of India and China. These empires emerged from ‘barbarian’ efforts to overcome similar challenges, and yielded strikingly similar incorporative ideologies and models of imperial governance.

This introduction focuses on how dead body images, seen as taboo, are framed in various ways to humanize or dehumanize the dead. The graphic nature of images of the dead in humanitarianism is framed as precisely what provides the grounds for their power to effect change; the social and cultural taboo against viewing dead bodies means that when we are invited to view them, it must be under extraordinary circumstances, and viewing is itself posited as a political act. Yet critics have raised the issue of voyeurism, pain porn, or compassion fatigue. In the context of dead enemy bodies, images of enemy dead are often viewed in a context that perpetuates a distancing between the viewer and the subject of the image, designed to cultivate affective responses of retribution, hatred, and satisfied revenge, rather than empathy. These framings are introduced precisely because the binary between bodies we display and bodies we don’t display needs to be examined and problematized. This begins to illustrate what is at stake in the context of the politics of emotion, in the sense that emotions are constructed and shaped through binaries of self and other, though these distinctions are always tentative.

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for the book. It briefly notes the evolution of debates about security in international relations thought before making a case that security can be understood as a social construction, given meaning by particular political communities in different ways at different times. These different meanings can be classified in terms of discourses – specific accounts of threat, referent object, agents of security and means of achieving it. After differentiating this account from the prominent Copenhagen School conceptual framework of securitization, the chapter notes the importance of conceiving security as a site of contestation and negotiation. It points to the political significance of the promise of providing security – the politics of security – and the ethical assumptions and implications of alternative accounts of security – the ethics of security.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the sovereignty cartel, the idea that states do not just compete with each other to maximize the national interest or cooperate with each other to provide global public goods, but also collude with each other to reinforce the centrality of the sovereign state as a category of actor in international relations. It reviews the existing international relations literature on state sovereignty and locates the idea of the sovereignty cartel within that literature. It develops the metaphor of the cartel and gives an overview of how this metaphor is developed throughout the book. It looks at different understandings of property rights underlying the idea of the sovereignty cartel and introduces the possibility that these understandings are not mutually compatible. Finally, the chapter provides a plan of the book and an overview of the chapter structure.