Chapter 2 explores the figure of the white mercenary in the context of decolonization by analysing the outcome of the Luanda trial and the response of the UK government to the indictment of its nationals in Angola. This is essential to highlight the fundamental distinction between these foreign fighters and the volunteers of the Spanish Civil War: fighting for personal profit as opposed to fighting for a noble cause, respectively. However, Western soldiers of fortune seem to be moved by certain political ideals: namely, to avoid a communist takeover of the African continent. The figure of the adventurer encountered in the interwar period reappears here, illustrating the ambivalent passions underlying attempts to ban or endorse mercenarism. The chapter ends with an analysis of the travaux of Art. 47 of API which frames the eventual exclusion of mercenaries from prisoner of war status in international armed conflicts.

This chapter considers Ghana's use of debt-based financial statecraft, describing the country's early embrace Chinese loans and substantial borrowing in international bond markets. Despite diversifying its sources of external finance, the government had limited success leveraging its reduced reliance on traditional donor funds in aid negotiations. Based on interviews with government and donor officials, the chapter demonstrates that, while the Ghanaian government initially secured some negotiation wins, it ultimately struggled to achieve its preferred outcomes with donors on either economic policy or financial management. The chapter attributes these difficulties to donors' diminished perception of Ghana's significance and a lack of donor trust, underscoring the complexities of using alternative finance as leverage in aid negotiations.

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.