The evolution of the modern nation-state and the consequent development of an international order founded upon a growing number of independent and sovereign territorial units inevitably gave rise to questions of international cooperation. The first major instance of organised international cooperation occurred with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the thirty-year religious conflict of Central Europe and formally established the modern secular nation-state arrangement of European politics. Over a century later, the Napoleonic wars terminated with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, marking the first systematic attempt to regulate international affairs by means of regular international conferences. The Congress system lasted, in various guises, for practically a century and institutionalised not only the balance of power approach to politics, but also a semi-formal international order.

This chapter reviews the model set out in the theoretical framework to examine the degree of congruence the six cases had with the relevant factors of controlling the initiative, the mastery of shared norms, and opportunities for influence, particularly the ability to bring other states into the favoured norm circle. It also examines the model’s inferences against the observed outcomes to examine the degree of significance each factor had in the respective regional organisation.

Renewable energy is playing a central role in countries’ efforts to diversify and move away from the use of fossil fuels. The shift to a low-carbon economy, through renewable energy power generation, is hugely dependent on public and private, domestic and foreign investments in the sector. However, the private sector, which is an important player for advancing the renewable energy sector, is faced with policy uncertainties and low returns on investments as compared to traditional energy sources (Mathews 2010). Therefore, the initial high costs of moving into the renewable energy sector need to be balanced out with governmental support that incentivizes investment in the renewable energy sector (Wilke 2011). The economic rationale behind government support for renewable energy rests on the fact that it has to overcome market failures arising from the inability of markets to account for social and environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions due to the use of traditional fossil fuels, while the environmental argument rests on advancing renewable energy production as a means of climate change mitigation (Peat 2012).

This volume appears twenty years after 9/11, a good time to assess what pundits predicted at the time of the attacks, which was that “everything had changed.”1 With the benefit of hindsight, can we now say that was an overstatement? What changed – and how?

This chapter addresses the expanding legislative role of the Security Council and expresses significant concerns arising from that trend. The author argues that the Security Council’s ambition to “legislate for the world” – which is manifestly evident in resolutions aimed at tackling the phenomenon of foreign fighters – may pave the way for abusive practices and human rights violations. The author’s apprehension originates from the fact that countries where democratic institutions are weak or even totally lacking often exploit the need to tackle international terrorism as a legitimate excuse to curb political opposition or any kind of view that differs from that of the regime in power. To support this claim, the cases of Belarus and of Ukraine, as far as the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2178/2014 is concerned, are taken into considerations. In these two countries, directions coming from the international level to criminalize foreign terrorist fighters and all the activities aimed at supporting them coincided in time with the most intensive phase of Crimean crisis. As a consequence, Resolution 2178/2014 was interpreted as an easy-to-take shortcut to prosecute pro-Russian forces in Crimea by labelling them as “terrorists”. Hence, universalizing counter-terrorism measures, as the Security Council has been trying to do since at least the 9/11 events, is potentially dangerous since the same provisions are directed to countries with patently different political, social and historical backgrounds, and the Security Council is not totally able to manage states’ choices once the resolution reaches the implementation stage.

The first chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book. It discusses the theoretical context in International Relations within which the study of long-term normative change is situated. It introduces the English School as the main theoretical perspective with which the rise of environmental stewardship as a fundamental norm of global international society will be analysed. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the main argument and an overview of the structure of the analysis.

International law does not address intelligence activities explicitly, and many scholars assume that international law has no effect on the practice of intelligence. Yet, international courts and bodies have recently started to hold states to account for internationally wrongful acts resulting from intelligence cooperation. This chapter analyses the effects of recent instances of state accountability on state decision-making, using a modified rational choice model accounting for the boundedness of state rationality. It shows that these instances of state accountability have changed the payoffs and costs of intelligence cooperation. States must now take into account the risk of accountability, and considerations of international legality may now outweigh domestic considerations. The chapter therefore argues that recent instances of state accountability before international courts and bodies have constrained states’ freedom in intelligence cooperation, thereby serving their national security interests. Existing research shows that respect for the rule of law is necessary to an effective fight against national security threats, and that measures violating human rights or undermining the rule of law are counter-productive. Hence, the chapter further argues that these recent instances of state accountability increase states’ respect for the international rule of law, leading them to protect their national security more effectively.

Chapter 7 explores the further strengthening and consolidation of the international environmental norm as well as contestation around it, from the 1990s until the early twenty-first century. In the first section, I explore how global environmental protection has been further embedded in international policy-making and cooperation. This process involved the inclusion of ever more issues in the international environmental agenda; the insertion of green norms into other international policy areas and regimes, most notably those concerned with economic affairs; and a strengthening and broadening of the institutional architecture for global environmental protection. None of these shifts in international practices and norms were uncontroversial or easy to achieve, they were the result of ongoing battles over how to put environmental stewardship into practice. Indeed, the second section of this chapter will discuss in more detail the ongoing normative contestation over global environmentalism. I conclude the chapter with a review of how environmental stewardship fits in with other primary institutions of global international society.

Chapter 4 traces the origins of the global environmental movement in the nineteenth century. It discusses the emergence of transnational environmental networks and the first international NGOs. It examines the first international efforts at environmental protection, mainly for managing shared resources and colonial conservation projects. It then traces the first failed attempts to establish an international environmental agenda, from the 1913 Berne Conference to the League of Nations.

UN Security Council Resolution 1373 is rightly viewed as the most significant international instrument pertaining to countering terrorism. Two features of the resolution are of concern to us: the sharing of security intelligence and other information, and, restrictions to human mobility. These two dimensions of global counterterrorism dovetail within the dark underbelly of the securitization of migration. There have been several high-profile instances where the United Kingdom and Canada have been directly involved in deportation to torture. Victims have faced numerous obstacles securing remedies for human rights violations. Perhaps most significant is the unwillingness of states to disclose relevant information during civil litigation, owing to national security or more broadly public interest privilege.

The United Kingdom has approached this problem by instituting “Closed Material Proceedings” (CMPs), where courts may base decisions on secret evidence, with the benefit of security-cleared Special Advocates mandated to represent the interests of plaintiffs. Canadian authorities have considered similar measures, having a rich history of secret hearings. Clearly, the use of secret evidence raises serious rule of law issues, as well as many practical, professional, and ethical challenges. This chapter explores these issues in the context of civil litigation of state responsibility for torture and other human rights abuses. As part of an ongoing socio-legal study on CMP in Canada and the UK, this chapter presents documentary and empirical findings, including interviews with judges, Special Advocates, and court administrators in both jurisdictions.