Chapter 6 inquires into the legality and purposes of belligerent reprisals in non-international armed conflict. At the outset, it delves into the travaux préparatoires of Additional Protocol II to the 1949 Geneva Conventions to overcome the paucity of black-letter provisions on belligerent reprisals in this type of conflicts and identify relevant practice indicating which reprisals are prohibited (and which are permissible). Then, it looks into the work of several fact-finding commissions, mandated investigations and expert bodies addressing situations of non-international armed conflict (including those in Myanmar, South Sudan, Yemen and Syria) to gauge their formalization of the mechanism. The re-instatement of reciprocity in the functioning of belligerent reprisals emerges clearly from the purpose of evening out the legal and substantive imbalance brought about by enemy breaches. This analysis results in a novel understanding of belligerent reprisals as a tool concerned with the overall equilibrium in the legal relationship between parties to the conflict and aimed at remedying their inequality of status.

The Introduction explains the relevance of a theoretical inquiry into the purpose and function of belligerent reprisals. It highlights several examples in recent practice where the vocabulary of belligerent reprisals has been harnessed by parties to an armed conflict, pointing to the continued relevance of the institution in contemporary warfare. At the same time, it outlines persisting difficulties in the terminology, regulation and governance of reprisals, and shows that they all derive from the failure by international legal theory to give a proper legal vest to the purpose and function of the mechanism. It points to fundamental fallacies both in how the question has been approached, and in how it has been answered. It proposes an alternative to existing accounts and outlines how it will be investigated in the book.

Chapter 5 analyzes the evolving security structures in East Asia since the end of World War II. What counts as security for the countries in the region and beyond, and the policy choices made accordingly, have made East Asian security the way it is today. Evolution shapes every component of international security, specifically the nation, the nature of politics, and epistemology. Conventional security theories such as the security dilemma and alliance apply to East Asia partly because Western practice and theory have become parts of East Asian practice and theoretical thinking. At the same time, East Asia had a much longer history, and was not a blank canvas for outside influence. The mixture of the old and new explains why East Asian security concepts and practices seem partly familiar and partly strange, which is characteristic of East Asian international relations.

The Conclusion draws on the findings of the book to analyse the main implications of a reciprocity-based understanding of belligerent reprisals. First, it distinguishes this formalization of belligerent reprisals from earlier theories stressing the law-making function of the measure. Then, it accounts for the continued relevance of belligerent reprisals even at a time when mechanisms monitoring and enforcing compliance with the laws of armed conflict gain momentum. Finally, it explains how a reciprocity-based interpretation of belligerent reprisals would affect follow-up reform of the mechanism – be it in the sense of fine-tuning its regulation, or in the sense of disposing of it altogether.

This chapter focuses on the Ethiopian government's successful use of debt-based financial statecraft. It examines Ethiopia's shift from heavy reliance on traditional donor aid to borrowing from Chinese lenders and issuing a debut international bond. Using interviews with government and donor officials, it highlights how this diversification of external finance allowed the Ethiopian government to obtain more favorable terms in aid agreements, including lenience from donors on governance issues, flexibility on economic monitoring, and donor support for the government's state-led approach to development. When Ethiopia's financing options later narrowed, the government's bargaining leverage with donors declined, further corroborating the role of alternative finance in aid negotiations. The chapter underscores the importance of donors' perceptions of Ethiopia's strategic value and donors' trust in the government for their willingness to accommodate the Ethiopian government's preferences.

Chapter 6 studies East Asian economic growth and development strategy. It starts with a section on how economic growth and the theory of growth have been constructed. It then discusses the East Asian economic miracle – rapid growth in GDP per capita with relative equity. Most East Asian countries have chosen a hybrid path, often emulating each other and building on recent successes. Most adopted the developmental-state strategy to different degrees and at different points, and they generally view modernization as a way to regain their past glories. This chapter focuses on material wealth production, with a particular emphasis on how East Asian nations adapt and innovate. It also discusses the consequences of East Asian growth in terms of the rise and fall of nations, the “rich nation, strong army”, the contest of political systems, and the environment. Uneven economic growth is a source of a shifting balance of power.

This chapter describes the book's case study approach, which compares Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya. All three countries experienced the regional trend of increased borrowing from China and in international bond markets in the 2000s. However, the countries vary in strategic significance and donor trust, allowing for tests of heterogeneity in the financial statecraft of borrowers. The chapter discusses the data collection process for the case studies, with over 170 elite interviews, mostly with government and donor officials participating in aid negotiations, and how this data is used to trace debt-based financial statecraft in each country. The chapter briefly provides background on each country's political and economic context and previews findings on how their external finance portfolios impacted aid negotiations with traditional donors.

This chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the financial statecraft of borrowers, drawing on bargaining frameworks to develop expectations for how a diversified portfolio of external finance enhances a country's leverage in aid negotiations with traditional donors. The chapter begins with donors' and recipients' preferences in negotiations, highlighting that donors have strategic and institutional reasons to provide development assistance, which leads them to compete in a marketplace for aid. When recipient countries diversify their portfolios of external finance, this diminishes their reliance on traditional donors and donors risk losing influence, in turn encouraging donors to provide more attractive aid. However, recipients vary in their ability to exploit this leverage, which depends on their strategic significance to donors and donor trust in their credibility.

Chapter 2 provides the theoretical and methodological foundations for understanding East Asian international relations and demonstrates how facts and theories are constructed. Building on that foundation, the chapter then provides a preliminary review of the merits and demerits of the prevailing theories: realism, liberal institutionalism, constructivism, Marxism, and neo-traditionalism, depending on the research questions we are interested in. The chapter also offers an initial connection between the existing IR theories and theory of evolution. It emphasizes that the theory of evolution does not necessarily replace any existing IR theory but offers instead a different insight and scientific framework, which may be left in the background or be explicitly applied.

This chapter demonstrates how the emergence of ethnicity led to the ‘domestication’ of race. During the nineteenth century, ‘race’ was an incredibly malleable term that could be used to describe both vast transnational populations differentiated by physical characteristics and smaller national communities such as the French or the Jews. With the emergence of a sharper divide between the biological and sociocultural spheres in the early twentieth century, this polyvalence came to be seen as a problem. To specify the meaning of race with greater precision, a cluster of new ethnos-based terms (ethnic group, ethnicity, ethnie, ethnos) was coined around the turn of the century. One important consequence of this conceptual shift was the effacement of the transnational stratum of race: there is no global ethnic line comparable to the global colour line. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a pluralised concept of civilisation has filled in for the suppressed transnational stratum of race.