The introduction offers a historical overview of terrorism through the ages and describes the development of international counterterrorism law. It discusses the interplay between terrorism and international crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. It also introduces some of the controversy surrounding terrorism as a term.

The architecture of international counterterrorism law is the subject of Chapter 2. It is a branch of public international law that has emerged from an evolving special legal regime to regulate action to prevent and punish terrorism and to tackle terrorists. International counterterrorism law is a matrix of global terrorism treaties and dedicated United Nations Security Council resolutions that require the incorporation of offences into domestic law combined with the salient rules of international humanitarian law and the law of law enforcement. These rules, which regulate when and against whom force may be used in counterterrorism, are supplemented by (though are sometimes inconsistent with) the content of regional treaties and domestic legislation. The standards and laws are subject to the constraints and oversight of international human rights law. The chapter also describes the content and adherence of regional counterterrorism treaties.

The Outlook chapter presents the achievements and challenges of what we can now call international counterterrorism law. Outside the context of armed conflict, sectoral treaties govern international terrorism involving a range of tactics and targets, notably hostage-taking, bombings, hijackings, and nuclear terrorism as well as attacks on foreign diplomats and, under a treaty approaching universality, the financing of international terrorism. But the distinction with terrorism in a situation of armed conflict in these treaties should have been drawn far more sharply. Under international humanitarian law, the definitions of terrorism in armed conflict are clear.

This chapter describes the complex twists and turns in the efforts to bring the war to an end in the 1980s. It shows that wars are easy to start and hard to end and that all wars must eventually end through a political act.

Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021 despite peace talk efforts in late 2020 and early 2021. International pundits had been predicting that Ashraf Ghani’s government might need to share power with a resurgent Taliban, but none had expected such a swift and complete takeover as the Americans readied to leave for good. Two decades of international intervention in Afghanistan were erased. The efficacy and desirability of intervention has been thrown into serious doubt, and with it the prospects for post-conflict state-building. This chapter introduces the rise, and possible fall, of the post-conflict state-building agenda. It introduces the reader to important concepts, noting the relationships between state-building, peace-building and nation-building, as well as underscoring the role of liberal ideology in shaping post-conflict state-building efforts, asking readers to reflect on what they believe external actors should, or should not, do.

This chapter offers an historical grounding in interwar international relations. It tracks and analyses the progress of international relations in the period between World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1939–45), both of which are rightly seen as two major and formative conflicts in international history and indeed for the study of International Relations. It is sometimes assumed that the two World Wars were primarily European affairs, at least in their origins, and reflected the persistence of European predominance in a fast-changing world. Yet these were truly global and globalising wars, as reflected in their causes, courses and consequences, the technologies they employed and the ideas they helped generate. The period in between the wars was a turbulent and unstable one. It foreshadowed European decline and witnessed the rise of the United States, the challenge of the Soviet Union and the Far East and, more gradually, of peoples around the world subject to imperial rule – in short, the interwar period provided the foundations for the international system that developed over the following decades. Many of its contours are still visible today.

This chapter explains the legal and political features of the United Nations. It begins with a short introduction to the UN Charter, which shows the framework of international law that defines, limits and empowers the organisation. It then puts these into a more practical setting, which emphasises how the United Nations is at the same time an actor, a forum and a resource for governments.

This chapter examines the politics of global poverty, inequality and development. The first section provides the background for our analysis of global poverty and inequality. Any meaningful discussion of poverty and inequality necessarily has to be in relation to development – which, as we show, is itself contested in theory and practice. The second section provides an outline of a relational perspective of global development. The third section focuses on the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. We conclude with some critical observations about the political significance of the relationship between development, poverty and inequality.

This chapter introduces an idea that has enjoyed a remarkable, if hotly contested, development in the post-Cold War era: humanitarian intervention. Based on a commitment to principles of humanity and respect for life, such action seeks to alleviate the unnecessary suffering caused by violent conflict through intervening in another state, with force under limited conditions. The chapter outlines the origins of humanitarianism and the history of humanitarian intervention before discussing the shift to the responsibility to protect (R2P). As world politics becomes ever more complex, debate about global responsibilities to protect suffering strangers will continue to shape the theory and practice of international relations. While abuse of human beings has not become less widespread, the preoccupation with COVID-19 and domestic priorities meant that little consideration was given to robust action against middle powers perpetrating mass atrocities in such places as Myanmar and Tigray, let alone against major powers in Ukraine and Xinjiang.

This chapter gives an overview of the theory and practice of global climate politics. First, it provides a brief history of the politics of climate change as they play out in the international negotiations on the issue overseen by the United Nations . Second, it looks at the formal organisational and institutional structures that exist to manage the international community’s response to climate change. Third, it reviews the ways in which different theories of International Relations have been applied to climate change, assessing both their potential and their limitations. Finally, the conclusion offers some thoughts on the evolving nature of the ‘global’ governance of climate change.

The chapter situates the class of institutions variously referred to as internationalized, hybrid, mixed or special tribunals in the system of international criminal justice and highlights their main rationales and features. It addresses the known strengths and weaknesses of the hybrid institutional model as compared to purely international criminal jurisdictions. Using the classification based on these courts’ legal nature as defined by the primary basis for their establishment and functioning, the chapter surveys the main hybrid courts (including some which are yet to be established), including but not limited to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Extraordinary African Chambers, the African Criminal Court, the UNTAET and UNMIK Special Panels (in East Timor and in Kosovo, respectively), the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, and the Special Criminal Court in the Central African Republic. It outlines the factual background to these courts’ emergence and addresses their subject-matter jurisdiction and applicable law, institutional and procedural features, and noteworthy contributions to international criminal jurisprudence. This overview is followed by the discussion of the issues raised by the hybrid courts’ (potential) relationship with the ICC and reflections on their achievements, deficiencies, and (the prospects of) wider impact.

The World Peace Brigade was one of many advocacy organizations in a sphere of unofficial international politics, a sphere in which corporations also paired with nongovernmental organizations to provide de facto recognition to nationalist claims. The political turmoil surrounding the United Nations intervention in Congo and the breakup of its neighboring Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland made sub-Saharan Africa the epicenter for this transnational advocacy. It may seem counterintuitive for a mining company with operations in regions controlled by colonial or settler-colonial regimes to support anticolonial nationalist aspirations. However, in 1962 the American Metal Climax mining company (AMAX) chose to back certain anticolonial nationalists in Southern Africa, in direct response to the blowback that its competitor, Union Minière, received for backing the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga. Katanga hovered over the imagination of advocates and nationalists as the ultimate example of illegitimate nationalism – the potential of failed national liberation – in which Western imperial interests had co-opted a state-in-waiting and violated postcolonial state sovereignty.