This chapter examines how oil wealth has fueled authoritarian resilience – dictatorship without significant outbreaks of civil war – in oil producers (petrostates) exposed to Muslim conquest. While the chapter’s analysis corroborates existing research that oil rents can hurt democracy, it makes four original contributions relevant for understanding why oil wealth has engendered authoritarian resilience in conquest petrostates. First, it identifies a tension in existing scholarship: the negative relationship between oil wealth and democracy but positive relationship between oil wealth and civil war, particularly in dictatorships. Second, this clarification is important in understanding why greater oil wealth in conquest petrostates has hurt democracy but has not fostered civil war. Third, the chapter introduces a new type of rent that is intricately tied to oil production in many conquest petrostates. The chapter argues that an implied security guarantee from the United States government has comprised an additional geopolitical rent which has augmented the military capacity of conquest petrostates to thwart insurgency. Finally, the chapter that oil wealth has not hindered a trajectory towards greater democracy in non-conquest petrostates.

This chapter illustrates the forms and dynamics of contractual hybridity in American wars using the case of Blackwater. Blackwater’s contractual hybridity was visible in its formal contracts with public funding. Contractual relations created power payoffs by deploying a contractor force for American wars and raised Weberian legitimacy dilemmas from limited contractor oversight and distributed accountability. Security contractors also disturb civilmilitary relations by posing as “civilian combatants” or “unlawful combatants,” depending on the preferred definition under international law. The chapter also follows bureaucratic debates on defining "inherently governmental functions" given contracting, which reveal the effort it takes to balance Idealized and Lived Sovereignty. By being attentive to formalized and publicized hybrid relations, the chapter thus wrestles with unique problems in sovereign governance that challenge the legitimacy of a sovereign authority that contracts itself.

What is the essence of group decision-making? How does group dynamics affect policy outcomes? This chapter contributes to foreign policy analysis and national security decision-making by advancing a comparative group dynamic perspective. Specifically, we examine three models of group decision-making: Groupthink, Polythink, and Con-Div, and apply each model to the Kennedy administration’s decision to impose a naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We claim that applying different group decision-making models to real-world cases presents a new way of explaining governmental decisions. Based on our comparative analysis of the three models, we find that the Con-Div model performs best in explaining the naval blockade decision.

What will be the contours of the “post-post-Cold War” world? This chapter takes up that question by examining the defining international and domestic characteristics of this new age and assessing their similarities with previous eras. We begin by identifying three defining attributes of the Cold War: ideological clash, limited economic exchange, and nuclear arms racing between the American and Soviet-led blocs. Next, we explore the central feature of the post-Cold War era - namely, American primacy. We then examine the trends that have eroded primacy's material underpinnings and produced new domestic and International conditions — global power shifts, technological change, and sociopolitical fragmentation -- then project forward how those trends are likely to evolve over the next ten to fifteen years. Finally, we examine the extent to which those trends are distinct from, or continuous with, the conditions facing the United States during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, and find that some important continuities remain even as meaningful discontinuities will disrupt existing patterns of international order. The chapter concludes by arguing that the post-post-Cold War world requires a new strategic approach for the United States — one guided by a principle of openness, rather than Cold War-style containment or post-Cold War-style liberal universalism.

Now that more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that, while some borders have disappeared, new fronts have appeared as well. And, rather than a “new world order,” a familiar antagonism between Russia and the West is once again asserting itself. Among the central points of dispute is the question of whether the West offered Moscow assurances in 1989-90 in the form of a NATO non-expansion guarantee. Diverging interpretations of this crucial development continue to hinder international understanding and dialogue. In this chapter, Sarotte draws on elements of her historical research into archives in six countries to present evidence on what actually transpired, and to discuss the following questions: To what extent do current challenges for European security policy still have roots in the decisions and commitments of the powers involved in the process of German reunification thirty years ago? How did the Clinton administration come to support full Article 5 NATO enlargement rather than NATO’s Partnership for Peace? And what can we learn from those events to address the challenges of today?

Julia Lee identifies temporal, spatial, and affective innovation in 21st century transpacific fiction. Locating formally innovative contemporary Asian American writing in the post-1965 contexts of migration, global economies of labor, environmental anxiety, language difference, and racialized violence, Lee shows how writers have represented new technologies of immediate communication across oceanic flows of migrants, commodities, information, and waste in disjointed, parallel, and non-sequential narrative structures. Childhood trauma lingers across time and geography in a story about a Filipino nurse by Mia Alvar, while novels by Min Jin Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and Thi Bui layer Asian and American modernities, postmodernities, and contemporary present-tenses.

This chapter analyzes a symbolic politics of 1980shuman rights discourses by focusing on the place Poland and Chile had in global debates on human rights. In particular, it shows how these two countries featured in three different debates: First, the chapter reconstructs debates at the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1982 to show how the Reagan administration tried to turn the situation in Poland, where martial law had been imposed in 1981, into a symbolic counterweight to Chile, a country that had come to encapsulate the human rights discourse of actors and movements critical of US policies in Latin America. Second, this chapter shows how Polish and Chilean activists themselves struck an alliance to increase the international salience of their causes and thus mobilize international support. Third, this chapter shows how these debates on human rights in Poland and Chile intersected with US debates about neoliberal economic policies.

This chapter focuses on the strong support Poland’s Solidarity movement received from the USA’s largest trade union, the AFL-CIO. At least partly, this chapter shows, the AFL-CIO’s strong advocacy for Solidarity has to be seen within US political debates triggered by the election of Ronald Reagan. In Reagan’s rhetoric, Communist totalitarianism came to denote only the most extreme form of the general threat of the modern state to silently encroach on the lives of individuals. Even as he revived the ideological Cold War, Reagan went on to reshape the social imagery underpinning it – a change that entailed curbing the power of organized labor. Against this background, Solidarity fascinated the AFL-CIO not primarily as an anti-Communist movement, but as a trade union. As Reagan reduced the influence of trade unions, the AFL-CIO invoked Solidarity to argue that it was not human rights as such that expressed the difference between East and West, but a particular human right – freedom of association. In the United States, the chapter demonstrates, Solidarity became a contested icon in a political and intellectual struggle initiated not by different foreign policy aims – in this field, the AFL-CIO agreed with Reagan – but by a reconfiguration of the normative and conceptual world of US politics.

While it is widely accepted that foreign relations law determines the domestic competences for international treaty-making and the place and status of international law in the respective domestic systems, the more informal and contextual influence of foreign relations law on international treaty making is understudied. With reference to the US position on the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, I argue that domestic foreign relations law at times shapes the negotiation process by limiting possible outcomes. At the same time domestic foreign relations law might be used as a bargaining tool to push other states to sign onto a particular negotiating position. Even though foreign relations law can unfold this power only under very specific circumstances, the example demonstrates potential effects of domestic constitutional design for the international legal system.

Chapter 1 offers a survey of human rights concerns in American foreign relations in the 1980s. First, it traces the human rights breakthrough in US foreign policy during the 1970s, emphasizing the important role individual members of Congress played in this development. The chapter notes the varied motivations behind congressional human rights activism and the selective adoption of human rights concerns. The chapter then examines the role of human rights in the 1980 presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, noting the candidates’ different visions for human rights concerns in US foreign policy. Aside from putting Reagan in the White House, the 1980 election also altered the composition of Congress, with Republicans winning control of the Senate. The chapter explores the implications this new political landscape had for congressional attention to human rights and summarizes the measures members of Congress employed to address human rights issues. Surveying American attention to human rights in the 1980s, the chapter examines liberal and conservative visions of human rights. Finally, the chapter situates human rights concerns within the context of other expressions of morality in American foreign relations.

This chapter explores the effects of the Trump presidency in human rights foreign policy. Taking into account the mixed character of U.S. foreign policy in previous decades, it provides a measured account of how the populist rhetoric of “America First” was translated into concrete actions, initially under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and more intensely under National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The disorganization of the administration has left room for career officers to implement a relatively traditional human rights policy in some areas. The Trump administration has departed most significantly from past administrations in declining to embrace the core principles on which human rights policy is based. Its support of strongmen because of – not in spite of – their authoritarian qualities may leave its most distinct (and damaging) human rights legacy.