Thus chapter discusses the basics of international responsibility, focusing mostly on states. It details how states can be held responsible, what the consequences thereof may be, and discusses the circumstances precluding wrongfulness. It further analyzes the responsibility of international organizations and of individuals under international law

The chapter discusses the basics of the law of the global commons (seas, air, outer space), by concentrating on what states can do in which zones or spaces

This chapter focuses primarily on the Department of State and the National Security Council in foreign policy making, and also outlines the key role of several economic departments in that process.

This chapter discusses the role of political parties and interest groups in affecting the direction of foreign policy, with a focus on the erosion of bipartisanship and the influence of ethnic groups.

This chapter advocates viewing the structures of international political systems through the lens of multiple dimensions of social differentiation; the structured processes by which social actors and positions are produced, populated, related, reproduced, and transformed. Social differentiation involves, at minimum, establishing who has what authority over whom with respect to which activities; that is, differentiating actors, activities, and authorities (which usually are complexly interrelated). And in addition to institutional and normative dimensions, which are notoriously excluded from the Waltzian account of structure, social differentiation has important material or geo-technical dimensions that are also ignored in the Waltzian account (which is not, as is often claimed, materialist). More generally, I argue that rather than seek to identify a small number of structural models composed of a few elements, we should aim for a checklist of dimensions of differentiation that illuminate some recurrently important features of the structures of some social and political systems of interest.

This chapter comprehensively discusses theoretical approaches to international law and global governance, and provides a historical overview of the development of international law

This chapter concluds the book and sketches some of the limits of what may be expected from international law

this chapter discusses the outline of the legal regulation of the global economy, focusing on how the system is divided into separate domains (trade, finance, investment, etc) and provides basic overviews of each of these

In a world of pre-given substances (or static relations) change needs to be explained. In a processual world, though, change, not stasis, is the norm. Persistence therefore demands explanation. Living and social systems are far-from-thermodynamic-equilibrium systems that, by taking in and creatively utilizing matter or energy, temporarily stave off the inexorable physical progression of entropy (movement towards greater disorder; decay). Social continuities no less than social transformations are socially produced. (A state, for example, can be kept in the far-from-thermodynamic-equilibrium state of statehood only through extensive and complex processes of (re)production.) And both continuities and transformations arise from similar processes that operate continuously. The chapter illustrates what I call continuous (trans)formation with the case of the development of modern militaries and introduces both John Padgett and Walter Powell’s framing of transposition and re-functionality and William Sewell’s framing of eventful history.

This chapter assesses the role of the Department of Defense, intelligence community, and Department of Homeland Security in foreign policy as well as the coordination mechanisms across bureaucracies.

This chapter develops models of what I call spatio-political structure, rooted in the differentiation of centers and peripheries. Distinguishing between a) the number of top-level political centers, b) the homogeneity or heterogeneity of centers, peripheries, and their relations, and c) the relative autonomy of centers and peripheries, I identify three principal types of political systems (both of which have “international” and “national” forms): systems of single-level governance (e.g., states systems); systems of single-center governance (e.g., empires); systems of multilevel multiactor governance (e.g., medieval Europe). In IR’s standard (Waltzian) structural framing, pre-defined units (individuals and states), on (three) pre-defined levels, combine into pre-defined types of (national and international) political systems. I instead treat as empirical questions the types of polities that exist within a space, their distribution and relations, and the resulting kinds of systems. The chapter concludes with a novel, heterarchic depiction of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Eurocentric international system.