A central criticism of power-sharing arrangements, and especially of their ethnic-corporate versions, is that they violate the basic principle of equality and nondiscrimination. The case of Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia & Herzegovina, submitted in 2006 and delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 2009, vividly illustrates this problem. In this case, the ECtHR struck down central features of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s power-sharing arrangements on the grounds that they breached the right to nondiscrimination with regard to participation in elections for the legislature and presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. To better understand the legal analysis and normative assumptions underlying this prominent perception of power-sharing arrangements, and to explore its shortcomings that the concept of collective equality aims to address, this chapter presents the ECtHR rulings regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitutional arrangements and the criticisms raised against it. It shows how the legal framing portrays the conflict as another version of the peace versus justice debate, in which human rights obligations represent the demands of justice, while power-sharing arrangements represent the unavoidable, though regrettable (in terms of justice), price of peace. This legal appraisal, the chapter argues, avoids a central and crucial normative feature of the situation – the “elephant in the room” of national self-determination in multinational places.

“If Dual Circulation can be pictured as a number eight, then the Hainan Free Trade Port (FTP) is the intersection of the two circles (of internal and external circulation),” declared regional Party secretary Shen Xiaoming in December 2020. As so often in China, an intangible concept (the linkages between the external and the internal) is made tangible in a physical location. Hainan's development as a free trade port is touted as the physical embodiment of how China would like to structure these links. Operational since June 2020, Hainan FTP is the most open region in China for foreign investment. Customs procedures are split into two stages: the requirements on imports from the rest of the world (“first-line procedures”), which will be increasingly relaxed by 2025; and a second line of checks, on exports from the zone to the rest of China. The declared main aim of the Hainan FTP is to use external circulation to serve internal circulation. Offshore duty-free shops allow Chinese consumers the benefits of duty-free shopping while the revenues are still earned in China. A further ambition is to attract foreign education and health providers and so remove the need for Chinese to travel overseas in order to gain access. Beyond this, there is a plan to attract high-technology companies, for example in the seeds, deep-sea and aerospace sectors, in order to accelerate capability-building in Chinese companies. Most foreign investment interest has come from large multinationals such as Tesla, GE and Itochu. Foreign companies are once again gaining access to China's market while building capabilities in China that, directly or indirectly, benefit Chinese companies too.

China's plan is that internal and external circulation will “mutually reinforce one another”, according to Han Wenxiu, deputy director of the Office of the Central Economic and Financial Affairs Commission. The imagery is of virtuous cycles of mutual benefit. Yet, after decades of increasing connectivity between China and the rest of the world, the Covid-19 pandemic cut links. It brought into sharp relief divergent approaches between China and most Western economies. Stark separation between the internal and external suddenly seemed a better description of the world.

Beijing 2015: Li Xiaolin, chair of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, declares that Andorra is a particularly valued partner of China. Andorra La Vella 2017: Andorra Telecom announces that it will work exclusively with Huawei to upgrade its high-speed internet access and to provide public Wi-Fi access across Andorra's capital. In 2019 China and Andorra celebrate 25 years of bilateral relations. Li's mention of Andorra, with a population of 77,000, was to make a point. China takes an interest and sees opportunity in every corner of the world. In 2017 Xi Jinping announced to the 19th Party Congress that China was ready to enter the centre stage of global affairs.

In the economic sphere, China is now the leading trading partner of 120 countries – more than any other country. China led the world as a source of outbound foreign direct investment in 2020, even excluding FDI flows out of Hong Kong. Although China's recent arrival to the world of outbound investment means that its total stock of overseas investments lags behind the United States, it already ranks at the level of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Over the past 20 years multinationals have seen China's economic presence in the rest of the world grow rapidly. First, imports from China offered competition in markets around the world as well as providing new sourcing opportunities for foreign companies themselves. Then, at the exhortation of Zhu Rongji in the 1990s, Chinese companies started to “go out” themselves, to establish operations overseas, invest and make acquisitions. From 2005 to 2017 acquisition activity intensified as Chinese companies bought foreign companies, so as to secure access to resources and advanced technologies or simply to capitalize on business opportunities. From 2013 onwards China's Belt and Road Initiative heralded a drive to increase infrastructure links and trade, supported by extensive lending from Chinese state-owned banks.

Just as many Western companies have struggled to succeed in China, however, so Chinese companies have often struggled in foreign markets. In 2020 Zhou Lihong, chairwoman of the China Chamber of Commerce to the European Union, said that the Chinese business community would like to see less “red tape” and fewer regulatory barriers in doing business in the European Union.

Doing business in and with China – never easy – has become much more complicated, volatile and controversial. In 2017 Xi Jinping declared that China had entered a “new era”, in which “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialist Economy with Chinese Characteristics” would be the sole guiding principle for financial and economic decision-making. “Xiconomics”, for short. In 2020 Xi Jinping announced Dual Circulation Strategy as China's new development pattern, with the priority on China's domestic economy. Business too had entered a new era.

Until recently multinational companies had enjoyed rapid growth and profits in many sectors of the Chinese economy. They did this by adapting to the local context, providing products that Chinese consumers value and demonstrating to the government how their operations supported China's development. This was all part of China's increasing integration in the world economy. What mattered much less was the ideology of the Communist Party of China (CPC), questions of national security and, indeed, in which country a multinational was headquartered. To the extent that shareholders and governments back at home had a view, they supported expansion in China.

Much has now changed in this world. The China context too has transformed. China remains the world's largest market in sector after sector and is the world leader in renewables, electric vehicles and digitization. But the business environment is more uncertain – and, especially for those who have faced Covid-19 travel bans – more opaque. Business leaders now need to know how Party ideology and national security fit into China's economic ambitions. Xi Jinping's leadership pervades all questions of policy and business climate. Geopolitical tensions increase the complexity. Governments, investors, customers and employees outside China no longer automatically support investment in China. Doing more business in China can cause problems back at home, but many multinationals earn sizeable revenues and profit in China. They see further growth potential, while developing alternatives to China takes time and effort even where it is an option.

Uncertainties abound. At the time of writing it is hard to disentangle the economic impact of Covid-19 lockdowns from more deep-seated problems in the real estate sector and elsewhere. At the 20th Party Congress, held in October 2022, Xi Jinping was officially confirmed in his third term as leader.

Environmentalism is a perspective that is usually portrayed in IPE textbooks as a relatively new one that has emerged in recent decades. But a number of thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed pioneering environmentalist ideas that gained considerable attention during the eras in which they lived. With differing degrees of commitment, these figures were united by their desire to curtail human-induced environmental degradation in order to foster more sustainable ways of living within the world economy. They disagreed, however, about the causes of, and solutions to, the environmental degradation they identified. Some combined their environmentalism with economic liberal views (Alexander von Humboldt, Stanley Jevons); others with neomercantilism (Henry Carey); still others with Marxism (Marx himself) and autarkism (Eve Balfour, Graham Vernon Jacks, Sada Kaiseki). Others promoted environmentalist ideas that did not fit well into any of those categories, such as the Lakotan cosmology of Black Elk, the “Cartesian” approach of Frederick Soddy, and the decentralist visions of Richard Gregg, Radhakamal Mukerjee, Lewis Mumford and John Ruskin.

For Mao Zedong, in his 1937 essay On Contradiction, contradiction played a central role in all matters of ideology, politics and policy. Mao argued that contradiction was the source of all movement and life in universe and society. This is not contradiction in the sense of logical inconsistency. It is, instead, the coming together of opposing forces, out of which a unity or synthesis arises that allows for progress. Eighty years later, at the 19th National Congress of the CPC in October 2017, Xi Jinping stated a change in the principal contradiction facing Chinese society. “What we now face is the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people's ever-growing needs for a better life,” Xi announced. “The evolution of the principal contradiction represents a historic shift that affects the whole landscape and that creates many new demands for the work of the Party and the country.” By resolving and managing the tensions in this “contradiction”, China is to achieve greater prosperity and strength. This is by no means an easy task, and it has not become easier in the last few years.

As outlined in Part I, Dual Circulation Strategy provides both the framework and a series of strategic choices for China's future economic development. It makes a sharp distinction between the realm of internal circulation, in which Xi Jinping and the CPC “lead everything”, and the world of external circulation. Dual Circulation prioritizes the internal and lays out a vision for mutual reinforcement between the internal and external. A look back over the past 150 years described how Chinese leaders consistently grappled with the questions of how to engage with the rest of the world and the meaning of self-reliance. Dual Circulation marks an adjustment rather than a radical change, but it is still a distinct shift from the years of “reform and opening up” in a globalizing world. The economic logic of Dual Circulation is just one of many pieces in what Chapter 3 described as the China policy puzzle. The role of Xi Jinping and of the CPC makes the development of the Chinese economy more than a matter of economic concepts alone.

In recent decades international and regional human rights norms have been increasingly applied to constitutional provisions, revealing significant tensions between primary political arrangements, such as power-sharing institutions, and human rights norms. This book argues that these tensions, generally framed as a peace versus justice dilemma, are built on an individualistic conception of justice that fails to account for the meaning and requirements of justice in deeply divided places, which are characterized by ethnically based political exclusion and inequalities.

By introducing the concept of collective equality as a new theoretical basis for the law of peace, this book proposes a new approach for dealing with the tensions between peace-related arrangements and human rights. Through principled, pragmatic, and legal reasoning, the book develops a new paradigm that captures more accurately what democracy and human rights mean and require in the context of ethno-national conflicts, and provides potent guidance for advancing justice and peace in such places.

Chapter 2 starts with an overview of the modern phenomena of ethnicity, nationalism, and ethno-national conflicts, and about the probable causes and background conditions that provide fertile ground for their outbreak, as these understandings are essential for evaluating the prevailing theoretical assumptions about justice and democracy in places of ethno-national conflict. To deepen the understanding of the sociology of ethno-national conflicts, the chapter introduces the four conflicts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Israel–Palestine. This chapter singles out political exclusion, the struggle over public goods of the nation-state, and group inequalities along ethno-national lines as leading factors that explain the outbreak of violent conflicts.

In 2011 the CEO of a US multinational met a senior Chinese official in a Shanghai Starbucks store. “What impresses you the most about China?” asked the official. “The speed of change. How fast everything moves. How it changes,” replied the CEO. “Really? Do you think so?” teased the official. “But we have been talking about the same policy challenges for many years – the need to have more consumption, the need to upgrade our economy and innovate, the need to reduce reliance on debt finance, the ageing population. Not much is changing. And yet – look outside. People are satisfied; things are working; everyone is getting richer. We have time and space to resolve our issues,” the official concluded.

The strategic choices that Xi Jinping announced for his Dual Circulation Strategy in 2020 were in fact not so new. Xi highlighted the need to strengthen China's own technological capabilities and to expand domestic consumer demand as the mainstay of China's future growth. Yet 14 years earlier, in 2006, the messages had been the same. China's future growth was to be based on home-grown “indigenous innovation”, and the growth of China as a consumer market. Even then the internal was to be favoured over the external. Xi's policy is more continuity than change.

A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at that time observed that, “in recent years, China has paid more attention to furthering the development of domestic Chinese standards and tech-nologies. It has done so largely to upgrade the country's industrial base, thus retaining more added value, but it has also done so to secure a seat at the table where global standards are set.”1 The 2006 Medium and Long-Term Programme for Science and Technology (MLP) set criteria for the accreditation of so-called national indigenous innovation products (NIIPs). These NIIPs would receive preference in public pro-curement. The plan included technologies such as biotech, information technology, advanced materials and manufacturing, energy technology, marine technology, laser technology and aerospace technology.

Although autarkic thought has not received much attention from IPE scholars, there is a long history of thinkers who prioritized their state’s economic self-sufficiency in order to enhance its autonomy (economic, political, and/or cultural) from foreign influence. This autarkic goal was rejected by classical economic liberals, neomercantilists, and most Marxists, but autarkic perspectives had at least as important a place in political debates as these other better-studied ones in some pre-1945 contexts. Like the other perspectives examined in this book, some strands of autarkic thought also circulated internationally in the pre-1945 era. This chapter identifies influential autarkic ideas developed by a number of thinkers from places as diverse as Britain (John Maynard Keynes, just briefly in 1933), China (Chen Gongbo), Germany (Johann Fichte, Friedrich Zimmermann), Haiti (Edmund Paul), India (Mohandas Gandhi), Japan (Aizawa Seishisai, Shizuki Tadao), Korea (Lee Hang-ro), Paraguay (José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia), Russia (Peter Kropotkin), Turkey (Sevket Süreyya Aydemir), and the west African colony of the Gold Coast (Kobina Sekyi). The chapter also highlights important disagreements amongst these thinkers, ranging from the specific reasons they prioritized autonomy to their views of the relationship between autarky and peace.

This chapter examines some distinctive ideas about economic regionalism that emerged during the interwar years and the early 1940s. Some arose in the context of Japanese debates about a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity, of which the most sophisticated was Akamatsu Kaname’s “Wild Geese Flying Pattern theory” of regional economic integration. Others were associated with post-1933 German designs for Europe’s economy, including “Schachtian” managed bilateralism (Hjalmar Schacht), fascist multilateralism (Walter Funk), and visions of a “great-space economy” (Friedrich Zimmermann). The final example comes from Peru’s Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre who advanced a quite different anti-imperialist vision of regionalism initially through what he called “Indoamerican economic nationalism” within Latin America and then via a wider vision of “democratic Interamericanism without empire” that was inclusive of the United States.