This chapter examines the unparalleled influence that the Court’s decisions have had on the Commission’s codification and progressive development of areas of the law under its consideration. It illustrates not only the great extent to which many of the Commission’s propositions have borrowed their authority from the pronouncements of the Court, but also the significant impact of the latter on the Commission’s choices concerning terminology and programme of work. The chapter further demonstrates the Commission’s conscious efforts to support the Court’s cause more broadly, including by encouraging the expansion of the Court’s jurisdiction and by promoting the doctrine of the sources of international law enshrined in its Statute.

Peripheral-patronage states have several ways in which they can respond to the bind outlined in Chapter 2. These strategies – recruiting, concealing and insulating – are usually selected according to the state’s possession or lack of domestic capacity and autonomy from outside interference. Some states fail to strategize, finding themselves in the unusual position of being granted autonomy, but lacking the capacity to use the space it provides. Concealing, which involves an invitation of outside scrutiny with the intent to manage the process that follows, is the most interesting strategy because, when successful, it can erode the international norms its users invoke. Successful concealing is possible when the concealing state is both illegible to outsiders and capitalizes on an asymmetrically interdependent relationship with its larger partner in which each has the capacity to harm the other’s reputation. As a result, the concealing state receives the larger actor’s seal of approval for conduct that actually undermines the latter’s chosen norm.

As the three primary cases do not show every configuration of independent variables that should lead to failed concealing, this chapter begins with two more circumscribed explorations of failed concealing in Tanzania and Honduras. It then explores the other strategies and examines their long-term effects. Although concealing is intrinsically risky since a ruler cannot know their own state’s legibility and presence of a strong enough asymmetrically interdependent relationship until these are tested in action, these other strategies may carry even bigger risks. As such, we should expect to see rulers, especially those with reasonable patronage-based capacity but little autonomy from outsiders’ interests and interference in their domestic affairs to try to conceal unsavoury domestic practices. It is therefore important to remain mindful of the effects successful concealing can have on global norms of human rights and good governance.

This chapter examines security and Australian foreign policy during 2016–2020 using two strands. It shows that Australia confronted both the ‘high politics’ issues that are the stuff of traditional foreign policy, as well as the unconventional security challenges to which Australia had to adapt. We begin by considering Australia’s conventional security politics, and the three consistent strands in Australia’s security thinking: how Australia fits into a world of super powers and the balancing act it must conduct to do so; relatedly, its alliance with the Unitd States; and Australia’s role in multilateral organisations. We then assess the so-called ‘unconventional’ security issues and their impact on Australian national security. Our analysis reveals that Australia’s responses to unconventional threats were increasingly conventional and relied on domestic tools to solve international problems. Some new threats seemed to bring international tools, like the military, to bear on domestic problems. Moreover, we demonstrate that the security environment was increasingly defined by the ‘grey zone’ – acts that reside between war and peace and take on unconventional forms.

This chapter describes the re-emergence of great-power competition between the United States and China, discusses how it reshaped the external environment and strategic space for Australia’s foreign policy, and examines how Canberra responded to it between 2016 and 2020.

Many states, almost invariably among those most ignored in international relations theory, exhibit some inconsistent and initially incoherent behaviour on the world stage. In particular, some of them have appeared to invite international scrutiny of domestic practices on which their governments rely to stabilize domestic affairs and to stay in power, but for which they could be punished, often by the very state or organization whose attention they request. The introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument and its implications for international relations theory and practice, especially when these states are miscoded as strong supporters of the norms they in fact violate as part of their domestic stabilization. When powerful actors make concessions in order to acquire a success case within their global missions of rights promotion, democratization or good governance reforms, they may also contribute to a slow erosion of those same norms.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) brought to greater prominence a question that has long vexed Australian foreign policy-makers: could they avoid choosing between the US security alliance and Australia’s complementary economic ties with China? Given the immense political capital invested in the BRI by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it was perhaps inevitable that Australia – like many other countries – had to declare its position. By so doing, however, Australia was forced to reckon with an issue that pitted its security interests directly against its economic ones. This chapter traces Australia’s evolving position on the BRI from 2016 to 2020, its interrelated justifications for rejecting the BRI, and the political and economic consequences of the decision. We show that debate over the BRI disrupted a longstanding consensus about the centrality of free trade and investment to Australian foreign economic policy. The BRI, we argue, signified a turning away from Australia’s previously enthusiastic support for global free trade to a more qualified security-sensitive approach.

Between 2016 and 2020 the Australian government established a regional health security diplomacy project, known as the Indo–Pacific Centre for Health Security. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative looked prescient. Its roots, however, could be traced back to Australia’s engagement with health security in the early 2000s. Then, as now, the government aligned its foreign policy agenda with health – specifically emerging infectious diseases – as a ‘scaled up’ approach comprising diplomatic, aid, and research and development. To explain Australia’s evolving relationship with health security this chapter proceeds in four parts. First, health security is situated with the recent tradition of ‘non-traditional security’. The second part examines the establishment of health security as a core theme in Australia’s response to global challenges. The third part turns to the government’s strategy and especially the Indo–Pacific Centre for Health Security both before and during the COVID-19 era. Finally, the chapter examines how Australia conceptualised its leadership role in regional health security.

This chapter argues that in the period under review, Australia’s foreign-policymaking faced a number of challenges, most notably in its handling of bilateral relations with China, which took a significant turn for the worse. Unfortunately, this was also a time when Australians of Chinese heritage made little contribution to foreign policy. Despite Australia’s multicultural identity and a professed embrace of the strength and diversity of its growing migrant populations, low numbers of Chinese Australians were working in government and politics. By drawing on data from the 2019 Lowy Institute Poll on Australian attitudes towards the world, this chapter argues that Asian Australians had different views on foreign policy compared to those born in Australia. If Australia is to truly embrace its growing migrant population to engage confidently with its Asian neighbours, the chapter concludes, the views of Asian Australians in political debates and policymaking matters need to be formally recognised through greater representation.