While the focus of the book is on the interstate use of force post-WWII, this chapter holds a rear mirror and offers a perspective of evolution of restraints that started long before states came into being. It recounts how human societies over the centuries became states free from widespread internal use of armed force and how great powers sought to avoid major armed conflicts through policies of balance of power and multilateral conferences. It describes how they developed common rules by concluding conventions and built institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations to create a rule-based order and mechanisms and methods to prevent the interstate use of force.

This chapter recounts China’s participation at the First Hague Conference of 1899, where the Qing Empire was a formally included but in practice highly marginalized participant, and the implications of the so-called Boxer Rebellion that also erupted in 1899, and was followed by the subsequent Eight Nation collective occupation that radically escalated nineteenth-century practices of intervention. The use of international law as a mechanism for systematically coordinating the interests of expanding Western commercial empires in non-Western spaces was now accorded quasiconstitutional status by the new treaty arrangements reconstructing the nearly collapsed Qing political authority.

This chapter surveys the rapid growth of globe-spanning organizations and institutions over the past 120 years – from the League of Nations to the UN to today’s International Criminal Court and European Union. Spurred by the world wars, economic crises, and environmental disasters of the twentieth century, humanity has already come much farther than most people realize in building innovative instruments of global concertation and crisis management. Therefore, the pathways of constructive change that lie ahead of us can best be understood as continuations and extensions of the remarkable gains already achieved. Four institutions – OECD, UN, NATO, and EU – exemplify distinct levels of rising integration across national boundaries. Institutions such as International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) have offered powerful new pathways for citizens’ concerted action beyond borders. The recently-adopted UN doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) reflects a newfound legitimacy of cross-border ethical obligations and proactive interventions to halt large-scale humanitarian disasters.