This introductory chapter presents some fundamental concepts that lay the foundation for the rest of the book. It seeks to accomplish three goals. First, it discusses the nature of war, and in particular Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics by other means. It is stressed that the book employs a very broad concept of war, including conflicts between states, civil wars, terrorism, some forms of interpersonal violence, and others. Second, it considers the possibility that the practice and frequency of war have changed over time. It observes how some modes of warfare have changed and some have not. It also suggests that it may be premature to celebrate the end of war, or even the significant decline of war. Third, it describes the scientific approach to understanding war and peace, highlighting the importance of asking general questions, developing theoretical answers to those questions, and testing those answers with empirical data. It also defines concepts such as hypotheses, independent variables, and dependent variables, and describes different kinds of data that can be used to test war-related hypotheses.

International alliances are the most important security institutions in international relations. This chapter examines different types of alliances, including security pacts, nonaggression agreements, and consultation pacts. It then connects alliances to more established ideas about balance of power dynamics. The next part of the discussion centers on the question, why do we observe states complying with alliance agreements, under conditions of international anarchy? Some possible answers are: some international alliance treaties increase coalition fighting power; states and leaders risk paying international and domestic audience costs if they violate the terms of an alliance agreement; and states only sign alliance treaties they mean to comply with, which means they are deliberate in how they design alliance treaties. Other concepts and debates under discussion include balancing, hands-tying, bandwagoning, free-riding, military bases, and power projection. Many of these concepts are applied to a quantitative study on whether the presence of an alliance agreement makes a state more likely to intervene on behalf of another state, and a case study of World War I.

Policy evaluation has great potential to enhance polycentric climate governance, but that potential has not yet been fully realized. This concluding chapter draws together the key contributions of the book, which not only emerge from significant theoretical development, but also from a novel empirical analysis that is the first to investigate policy evaluation in the polycentric setting of the EU, as well as in Germany and in the United Kingdom. Future research should further explore causal drivers of the emergence of policy evaluation in polycentric governance systems, and unpack the actual use of knowledge in policy-making, a difficult, but necessary area of inquiry going forward. Additional aspects of polycentric governance theory, such as the role of evaluation in building trust and generating linkages between different actors, should also be explored. The collective research and climate governance endeavor will continue—this book has offered some new directions in which the journey may advance.

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of state-funded evaluations collected for this research. State-funded evaluations are by definition not self-organized, and they comprise the lion’s share of the 618 climate policy evaluations unearthed between 1997 and 2014 at the EU level, in Germany and in the United Kingdom. The chapter presents an analysis conducted with a novel coding scheme and demonstrates the growth of state-funded evaluations in number over time, as well as the fact that most evaluation remain within their own governance center in terms of funding, evaluating and the policy on which they focus. There is a strong focus on certain types of climate policy, notably renewables, cross-sectoral and energy efficiency. However, legal requirements for evaluation are not the main drivers. State-funded evaluations show a cursory treatment of context, and limited realized potential for driving interaction across governance-centers.

This chapter explores terrorism, terrorist groups, and potential solutions to terrorism. It discusses conceptual and legal definitions of terrorism. It then provides historical context, describing terrorist waves driven by ideologies such as anarchism, anti-colonialism, New Left perspectives, and various religions. The chapter looks at who becomes a terrorist, taking account of theories of grievance, radicalization, recruitment by terrorist groups, lone wolf terrorism, and foreign fighter recruitment. It considers relationships between regime type and terrorism, examining why democracies, anocracies, and autocracies respectively might be more or less likely to attract terrorist violence, and exploring issues such as media coverage, grievance, and repression. Terrorist tactics and how these might diffuse across groups are discussed, as are terrorist group cooperation and state sponsorship of terrorism. The chapter also looks at the challenges of crafting effective counterterrorism policy, with a focus on deradicalization. It then applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study on whether targeting terrorist group leaders helps stop terrorism, and a case study of al-Qaeda.

This chapter opens with some basic description of and historical background on nuclear weapons. It then develops the basics of nuclear deterrence theory, working through concepts such as mutual assured destruction, first strike capability, second strike capability, first strike instability, the stability–instability paradox, and the nuclear triad. It then works through the causes of nuclear proliferation – the spread of nuclear weapons to new countries – including the logistical details of starting a nuclear weapons program. Relatedly, it examines the tools the international community possesses to slow the spread of nuclear weapons, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, extended deterrence, and economic sanctions, before working through both sides of the debate on whether the spread of nuclear weapons is stabilizing or dangerous. It then asks if nuclear weapons are useful tools of interstate coercion, before examining the conceptual foundations and history of nuclear arms control. The chapter applies many of its concepts to a quantitative study of whether extended deterrence makes allies more likely to start wars, and a case study of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Following the theoretical rationale for a role of policy evaluation in polycentric climate governance, what can be said about its actual role in light of theoretical expectations? The empirical data show that the theoretical expectations play out insofar as the elements that were hypothesized do exist in the context of the EU, Germany and in the EU, namely that both self-organized and non-self organized evaluation exist. The collective action dilemmas that feature at the very core of polycentric governance theorizing also materialize through evaluation, pointing to a significant role of the state, while non-state actors also contribute. Lesson-drawing may thus emerge as a function of evaluation, but the full theoretical potential of evaluation has not yet been realised, given the various deficiencies that both state-funded as well as society-funded evaluations contain.

The European Union, Germany and the United Kingdom have been characterized as leaders in policy evaluation, including in the area of environment and climate policy. The first approaches to evaluation emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, as the EU started dispersing funding to new Member States and various types of reforms demanded more efficient and effective government action. Unpacking such developments, this paper focuses on the historical development of policy evaluation at the EU level, as well as in Germany and in the United Kingdom. It focuses particularly on the actors and institutions that have advanced evaluation, especially the area of environment and climate policy evaluation. The chapter closes with what we know about evaluation in these three jurisdictions and the three foundational ideas of polycentric governance, namely self-governance, context and interactions between governance centers. It provides the starting point for the empirical exploration in this book.

This chapter examines the role public opinion plays in the formation of foreign policy, especially decisions for war. It first presents foundational concepts and debates about the nature of public opinion, including the conditions necessary for the public to have reasoned judgment about foreign policy, and the conditions necessary for public opinion to affect foreign policy in a democracy. It then examines a series of related issues and debates, including whether the public holds coherent opinions, how the public uses information to form opinions, the role of the media in the formation of public opinion, and whether public opinion is shaped by the spin of political elites. It explores the role of partisanship in public opinion, and tackles the normative question of whether public opinion should guide foreign policy choices. It addresses other concepts pertinent to public opinion debates, including framing, the elasticity of reality, and "rally ‘round the flag" effects. It then applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study of the effects of battlefield events and leadership rhetoric on public support for war, and a case study of public opinion during the Iraq War.

The Conclusion summarises the sum of the individual parts of the knowledge contained across the ten chapters of this book. This is done by answering the three research questions that were posed in the Introduction of the book.