The emphasis on the ethics of personal data collection in this edited volume provides various case studies the occasion to bring race and gender to the forefront once again as lenses to understand international relations. The myth of the founding of international relations in 1919, analyzed by Acharya and Buzan (2019) a century later, is one that obfuscates the influence of race relations as well as gender in the early development of the discipline during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These case studies broaden the ways we understand international relations in the West and, as importantly, in the non-Western space given the countries that are the subjects of analysis: China, Iran, Taiwan, and India, as well as the European Union (EU) and the United States. Mainstream international relations theory does not fully capture the evidence of cyber-based, technology-driven activity, which influences the decisions leaders make impacting the lives of billions of people across the planet. As the contributors focus on the relevance of race and gender across cases, this volume underlines our concerns about the future of democracy in the face of the rising tide of authoritarianism around the world. The plight of the world's largest and most plural democracy, India, under the Modi government; the increasingly aggressive nature of China under President Xi Jinping; as well as the impact of Trumpism in the United States during the Biden presidency make these concerns, which place illiberalism at the center of developments, pressing as well as timely.

The supreme tension in the post-pandemic experience is inherent in the ways in which emerging powers once categorized in the Third World, notably Brazil and India, are driving the spread of COVID-19. Public health in developing states has become a major influence in the civil society dimension of globalization. This evolution prompts us to consider the need for an international relations lens, inclusionism, which picks up where environmental stewardship (Acharya and Buzan, 2019, pp. 212–15), with its focus on climate justice and shared fate concerns, leaves off. This lens has COVID-19 as a reference point given the pandemic's truly global nature in modern times impacting most states in the world except North Korea and a small number of island countries.