This chapter tackles the challenge of characterizing those rights that constitute socio-economic rights. It offers a brief consideration of this catalogue/generation by assessing the rights to adequate standard of living, housing, food, water and sanitation, and clothing. After distilling the main idea of the specific right, illustrations are set forth. In this area, the tendency of states to deny they have resources necessary to guarantee these rights has largely undermined the progressive development of this set of rights.

To conclude the book, this chapter considers the implications of the theory and findings for the political behaviors that are important to democracy, including voter turnout, and for scholarship on international relations and democratic backsliding. Bush and Prather discuss how the evidence presented in the book complicates the narratives scholars and others have told about how foreign actors shape local trust in elections. Without taking seriously the psychology of citizens, we cannot understand who the most vulnerable individuals in society are to the influence of foreign actors. This chapter also explores how the book’s theory might be expanded to incorporate the role played by elites and political parties in amplifying or diminishing foreign actors’ effects and the effects of other forms of international interventions on domestic politics. Finally, the authors conclude with thoughts on how foreign interventions in elections contribute to polarization and thus to some of the threats to democracy currently facing our world.

The chapter summarizes the salient patterns of China’s major-power diplomacy under President Xi Jinping and highlights how it differs from the development-driven, low-profile strategy of the previous era under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. It then discusses how Chinese diplomacy struggles to balance a policy of seeking change within the global order and a revionisim risking a cold or a hot war. The next section addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic tested China’s strategic opportunity. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of the study.

The rights of children undergo close scrutiny in this chapter. Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Magna Carta of children’s rights, enjoys nearly universal support, it did not settle all interpretive questions. This chapter reviews definitional questions such as when the rights of the child are being, shown to ascertain, in practical ways, the difference between a child and an adult. Among the topics covered are the exploitation of child labor, “streetism” as it affects children, the participation of children in armed conflict and the landmark prosecutions of those who recruite them in international criminal tribunals. The global campaign to discourage child marriage is another matter considered. The chapter ends with a consideration of empowerment rights such as enfranchisement.

While virtue ethics is distinguished from deontology and consequentialism by its focus on the actor and their character rather than specific acts, it can nonetheless be illuminating to analyze particular acts through a virtue ethics prism. Such an analysis may be helpful in coming to understand why, in a specific situation, the actor came to their act. The point here is not so much to appraise the act and assess whether it was good or bad but rather whether the act can be made understandable – and perhaps justifiable – in light of the circumstances of the case and the agent’s character. Put differently, and perhaps more accurately, the idea underlying what follows is that their conduct tells us something about the individual concerned and simultaneously suggests how difficult situations can be approached – atypical though they may be. Much conduct is hemmed in by the context in which it takes place, and thus there is little point in copying other people’s conduct. But it may be possible to draw broader lessons from looking at specific situations and how people responded.

The virtues may not only be inspiring or exemplarist in the way discussed in the previous chapter but may also help define or circumscribe what can be expected from persons in particular positions. If it is true that being an accountant entails different things from being a doctor, it may (or must) be possible to provide at least a rough description of the position in terms of the virtues. And this, in turn, can be achieved by looking at various occupants of a position and distilling what is worthy of emulation and what is best not repeated. This is a difficult task in that circumstances are rarely the same – a positive and definitive job description, valid for all times and situations, will not be possible. But what might be possible is to provide a rough description – things to pay attention to when appointing individuals and monitoring their performance.

This chapter analyzes various ways of interpreting “disability” in historical and cross-cultural perspectives.The nomenclature reflects negative attitudes toward persons with disabilities and adversely affected early attempts to draft international standards. After documenting some types of discrimination against persons with disabilities, the focus shifts to possible methods of addressing stigma in civil society. The extraordinary plight of some subgroups within the disability community, such as children with albinism, whose lives and well-being are at risk in countries like Tanzania, receives special attention.

Foreign influences on elections are widespread. In the introduction, Bush and Prather explain how and why outside interventions influence local trust in elections. The chapters introduces the book’s theoretical framework and new survey evidence that will interest scholars, students, and practitioners who want to understand the conditions under which foreign actors enhance or undermine election integrity.

Bush and Prather turn to election meddling in Chapter 5. Similar to Chapter 4 for monitors, the chapter begins with descriptive information about election meddling and its prevalence, as well as showing substantial public concern about it globally. The authors further demonstrate that across all three countries in our study, individuals who believed foreign actors had a negative influence on elections had lower levels of electoral trust in their elections. But the book’s experiments again offer only limited support for the conventional wisdom. The treatments priming individuals about election meddling either had no effect on perceptions of election credibility or only had an effect when the experiments were able to reassure people that meddling had not occurred. In summary, Chapters 4 and 5 do not offer a great deal of support for the conventional wisdom. But the authors show in Chapters 6 and 7 that these analyses of the overall effects of foreign interventions mask considerable variation.

In Chapter 4, Bush and Prather begin testing the theory with respect to election monitoring. After discussing the ecology of international election monitors and showing general public acceptance of them, they find limited support for the hypotheses about average effects of monitors. In none of the book’s cases did information simply about the presence of international monitors increase trust in elections. Bush and Prather find more support for the conventional wisdom about the effects of monitors’ reports, as positive reports increased trust relative to negative reports in Tunisia and the United States. The substantive effect was fairly modest, however, and they do not find evidence that monitors’ reports had the same effect in Georgia.

As highlighted earlier, whenever things go wrong, the immediate and inevitable response is to call for better rules, new rules, different rules, new institutions, or better institutions to apply the rules that already exist – or a combination of the above. This is curious, as usually there are some rules in place, and often enough, those rules were considered perfectly fine before things went wrong. Moreover, there is not always a lack of institutions to apply them either, whether on the international or domestic level. Still, time and again, rules are manipulated, ignored, stretched, departed from, bent, or reinterpreted. Even relatively clear and settled rules can suffer this fate, let alone rules that are less clear. It is the general argument of this book that a focus on virtue ethics may well come to be of assistance.

Starting with a discussion of genocide studies and the Genocide Convention, this chapter analyzes the definition and the theories of the causes of genocide. It presents the proposed and used strategies of how to intervene when there is a genocide and how to prevent genocide. It also examines several catastrophic examples, including those in Bosnia and Rwanda and the Darfur crisis.

Building on the discussion of the Belt and Road Initiative, the chapter offers a comprehensive inquiry into China’s economic statecraft. It first argues that the analogy often drawn between the BRI and the Marshall Plan misconstrues contemporary China’s economic statecraft. It then examines how the interest communities and partnership diplomacy serve as mechanisms for China’s economic influence. The next section considers how, with Chinese economic ascendancy in Asia, a semblance of Chinese centrality in Asia is emerging. The following section looks at China’s global influence effect in terms of the international discourse on its great-power standing as well as its drive for technical standard-setting in key industries. Lastly, the chapter discusses the built-in limits of the BRI and broad limitations of the Chinese economic statecraft in the twenty-first century.