In Chapter 4, the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) serves as a case-study to test (and ultimately refute) a purely enforcement-based formalization of belligerent reprisals. In the field of chemical warfare, reciprocity and enforcement are shown to converge (rather than exclude each other) in the operationalization of belligerent reprisals. Reciprocity is seen as inspiring both the purposes associated with the measure (restoring the balance of rights and obligations and countering unlawful military advantage) and the specific traits that it would take (in-kind breach). In the "war of the cities", belligerents resorted to reprisals with purposes that cannot be encapsulated in the enforcement paradigm. These included the function of ensuring equality of opportunities (as a form of negative reciprocity) and that of strengthening, enacting and agreeing on new standards of conduct when the specific content of applicable rules was not clear or settled (as an aspect of positive reciprocity). As a result, belligerent reprisals appear as a highly flexible tool by which parties to an armed conflict bargain, approve or refuse, and police the concrete legal framework governing wartime interactions.

Chapter 10 explores democracy versus autocracy. It offers a frequency-based fitness analysis of the political regimes in the world, demonstrating the superior fitness of democracy, represented by the United States in time and place, but also revealing the resilience of non-democratic forms of government, represented by China. Countering the larger historical trend, democracy has retreated and autocracy has gained in recent years. It is difficult to tell whether this is a temporary setback for democracy or the start of a longer trend. Evolution does not assume constant progress, so the chapter dives deeper into the performance criterion for competing political regimes by peeling off the labels and examining different components of a political regime. In addition, the chapter offers a discussion of how East Asians have lived with the liberal international order, which most current American and Western leaders view as central to their fight against autocracy.

Chapter 1 places the institution of belligerent reprisals in relation with the two conceptual frameworks of reciprocity and enforcement. First, it sketches the trajectories by which international law has approached the phenomenon of belligerent reprisals, identifying extant prohibitions and clarifying the requirements for their lawful adoption. After recalling outstanding questions in the international regulation of the mechanism, it describes the two paradigms that legal theory could draw from to conceptualize belligerent reprisals. On the one hand stands reciprocity, as embodied chiefly in the termination or suspension of the operation of a treaty as a consequence of its breach; on the other, the paradigm of enforcement as manifested in countermeasures. Having described their main tenets, the chapter shows how these two blueprints, despite co-existing in the early theories on belligerent reprisals, have come to be seen as mutually exclusive, thereby offering two clearly distinct alternatives for the following formalization of the purpose and function of the mechanism.

Chapter 7 introduces students to the monetary and financial dimensions of East Asian international relations, which are fragmented regionally while tied closely with the Western-dominated monetary order. Monetary power is arguably as important as military power, but it is not well understood and not commonly included in an IR textbook. As a social construction, monetary and financial power are related to but not equivalent to productive power. East Asia does not stand in isolation, because its contemporary monetary and financial practices and theories are integrated into the global system. Thus, this chapter examines U.S. dollar hegemony. Following a broader discussion of the exchange-rate regimes adopted by East Asian nations, the chapter discusses the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis, a monumental event in post-war East Asian international relations triggered by a currency crisis. The chapter ends with a discussion of the 2008 Great Recession.

Chapter 9 studies the U.S.-China rivalry, which has strengthened since the early 2010s. From an evolutionary perspective, strategy is defined as a phenotype or playbook and strategic rivalry as a contest of different phenotypes in the larger ecological environment. International relations are thus fundamentally defined by competition and selection. Competition may lead to divergence among units, and the mechanism of selection indeed requires different types. The United States and China represent two different types of political systems, although there has also been mutual learning. The U.S.-China rivalry is consequential for East Asia and the world because they are currently the two greatest powers, with the sources of their power constructed and adapted over years. The chapter demonstrates how the United States and China have been in different stages since the founding of the United States in 1776, experiencing ups and downs in their bilateral interactions since 1784.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.