This chapter discusses the position (and especially protection) of the individual in international law, whether through human rights law, refugee law, the right to self-determination, or other means

This chapter outlines the various roles that the media can play in shaping foreign policy and discusses the limits and possibilities of public opinion as an influence on the actions of policymakers.

This chapter outlines the degree of change and continuity that the Obama administration brought to foreign policy and compares it to the Trump administration and its America First foreign policy.

This chapter discusses whether and in what circumstances states can resort to the use of force

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Cold War, the containment policy, and the Cold War consensus (and its challenges) that were developed against the expansion of international communism.

This chapter analyzes the Reagan administrations realist and Cold War foreign policy approach and the realist/idealist approach of the George H.W. Bush administration as the Cold War was ending.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

This chapter discusses how states ought to behave in tiems of armed conflict, highlighting the role of such mechanisms as proportionality and military necessity

This chapter discusses the subjects of international law: how states come into being, and how international organizations are created.

The remaining chapters of this book begin to sketch a new systemic/relational perspective and illustrate some of its implications and attractions. Like systems approaches, relational approaches in contemporary IR, which employ frames such as networks, fields, practices, and assemblages, stress the arrangement of parts of wholes. A systems perspective, however, highlights a tendency among relationalists to overemphasize relations and underemphasize processes. (The frame “relationalism” draw attention away from processes and usually leaves obscure how relations and processes are related.) I argue for a systemic/relational perspective that understands social systems as configuring configurations that configure. And I argue that these hierarchically layered assemblages can best be understood through relational processual explanations.

This chapter discusses the efforts of Congress to reassert its constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy, its relative success in this area, and its efforts to engage more fully with the president.