This chapter considers the “tripwire effect” claim that states sometimes deploy small troop contingents abroad to tie hands. The tripwire effect proposes that the deaths of even small numbers of foreign deployed troops would force the state to become involved, tying its hands to abide by a commitment to defend an ally. The chapter explains why states do not do this. States see tripwire effects as not reliably bolstering deterrence, and if states do fear that tripwire effects could tie their hands and drag them into an unwanted war, they remove troops in order to reduce escalation risks and keep their hands untied. The chapter examines the canonical case of alleged tripwire troop deployments, American deployments of small force contingents to Europe in the Cold War. The chapter demonstrates that neither the Truman, Eisenhower, or Kennedy administrations deployed small troop contingents in order to deter Soviet aggression via tripwire effects. During the 1958–1959 and 1961 Berlin Crises, when the US recognized the possibility that troop deaths might tie American hands and drag it into an unwanted war over Berlin, the US took steps to reduce the likelihood of such deaths and of escalation. It chose flexibility over tied hands.

This chapter applies the Chapter 5 alliance flexibility argument to three of America’s most important alliances: NATO, the Taiwan alliance, and the Manila Pact. All three alliance treaties included several types of flexibility language, and across all three alliances the US and others repeatedly used the flexibility language to justify staying out of undesirable conflicts. The only exception is President Johnson’s 1964 decision to intervene in the Vietnam War, motivated by the Manila Pact alliance. However, this chapter demonstrates the exceptionality of this decision. The Manila Pact was designed to be flexible, and the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford administrations all used the flexibility language to stay out of conflicts involving Manila Pact signatories including Laos, Pakistan, and South Vietnam. Johnson himself used the flexibility language to keep the US out of the 1965 India–Pakistan War. The chapter discusses why Johnson felt unable to use the flexibility language of the Manila Pact to stay out of the Vietnam War, even though he recognized the existence of such language. This is one of the first discussions of this new irony of the Vietnam War: Johnson knew of an escape route to avoid US involvement, but chose not to use it.

When reflecting on this book’s insights, a key question is highlighted: What is the prospect for effectively preventing and resolving armed intrastate conflicts globally? The threat of such conflict erupting remains a constant risk for policy-makers and researchers to investigate, and to prepare for constructive intervention. As discussed throughout this text, the challenges inherent to establishing effective peacekeeping policies and resolving intrastate conflict remain. Furthermore, this chapter addresses how areas of non-violent conflict, but high tension, threaten to escalate in the future. Is it possible to successfully intervene and to deescalate future intrastate violence? From the timing of intervention to international cooperation, the debates and critical lessons that we conclude with here will encourage thought-provoking discussions on formulating effective policies to prevent and end intrastate violence.

Most civil wars involve internationalized intrastate conflict. These are characterized by foreign involvement or intervention for participating parties involved in domestic fighting. From just two such conflicts in 1946, the frequency of these conflicts peaked at twenty-seven occurrences in 2020, and remains high. As studies continue to analyze intrastate conflicts, internationalized variations also become focus areas, given their often-complicated initiation across regions and multinational groups. To address the challenges of internationalized conflicts, this chapter provides a strong foundation for analyzing why geopolitical conflicts such as the Cold War inhibited the successful prevention and peaceful resolution strategies of third-party actors exposed to internationalized war. Chapter 6 aims to provide greater understanding of these events, third-party motives, and the risks of intervention. External involvement further complicates conflict resolution, and poses significant threats to international peace and security. Whereas most external actors may be motivated by geopolitical benefits from engaging with allies in conflict, supporting factions might not always align with these interests in warfare, in turn causing challenges for both them and those they support.

The chapter starts from the premise that peaceful change can only be regarded as peaceful if it is founded on the shared understanding that the change being instituted is “good” – meaning that it is not incompatible with the vision of the “good life” of those who will be touched by the change. The chapter uses constructivist insights to establish if international organizations can be seen as agents of peaceful change, and if so, how and with what opportunities and limitations they are able to undertake action that can lead to peaceful change? The chapter focuses – perhaps counterintuitively – on NATO as an agent of peaceful change, demonstrating that even though NATO is widely perceived as an agent of repressive – even violent change – it has played an important role as an agent of peaceful change in the relations of its members and within the liberal international order. However, the chapter finds that the prospects of international organizations acting as agents of peaceful change outside their own domain are hampered by them being “sticky” and more likely to be guardians of the status quo rather than agents of change.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Cold War convention of containment, which undergirded American involvement in Vietnam, was broadly shared, internalized, at times even fostered, by the United States European allies. This consensus broke down by the 1960s, as successive US administrations saw themselves locked ever more rigidly into Cold War logic which seemed to require going to war to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam. By contrast, the United States transatlantic allies and partners increasingly came to question the very rationale of US intervention. By the mid-1960s there was a remarkable consensus among government officials across Western Europe on the futility of the central objective of the American intervention in Vietnam of defending and stabilizing a noncommunist (South) Vietnam. European governments refused to send troops to Vietnam. However, West European governments differed considerably in the public attitude they displayed toward US involvement in Vietnam, ranging from France’s vocal opposition to strong if not limitless public support by the British and West German governments. Across Western Europe, the Vietnam War cut deeply into West European domestic politics, aggravated political and societal tensions and diminished the righteousness of the American cause.

The chapter examines how the radical Right’s counter-hegemonic struggle relates to other struggles for power in contemporary world politics and attacks on the so-called liberal international order (LIO). Drawing on recent literature on struggles for recognition, we show how the radical Right has built powerful transversal, global alliances based on a logic and discourse of difference and diversity rather than claims to Western superiority. We illustrate this through an analysis of an emerging global alliance in defence of the ‘natural family’. The radical Right’s civilisationalism and calls for multipolarity also enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The multi-polar, civilisational world order envisioned by the radical Right is not anti-hierarchical and inclusive, but legitimises new differences and new forms of exclusion through its claims to cultural diversity. It is a more sovereigntist vision of the world in which exclusionary illiberal forces would be able to operate with fewer international constraints.

Due to high turnover, formal international organizations (FIGOs) face challenges in retaining knowledge – particularly about strategic errors in operations. Errors in the arena of crisis management involve high costs, such as civilian casualties. However, scholarship addressing how security FIGOs share knowledge about what went wrong remains limited. This chapter argues that informal networks among political and military elites are critical for knowledge sharing within FIGOs, even in the face of sophisticated formal learning systems. The study draws on interviews with 120 elite officials at NATO and employs process tracing and social network analysis. Findings indicate that knowledge sharing hinges on the actions of a few elites – “knowledge guardians” – who are central to the transnational, informal elite network. Challenging assumptions about the superiority of formal systems, this chapter stresses that informal governance plays a central role in FIGO knowledge retention, which is critical for institutional memory and learning.

The period 2006 to 2010 witnessed a renewed Australian interest in and engagement with Europe following decades of relative neglect. Australia’s close trade, foreign and security policy relationships with Asia and the United States, coupled with a European Union (EU) agricultural policy inimical to Australia’s trade interests, were major determinants of Australia’s neglect of Europe from the 1970s to the early years of the twenty-first century. A vision of Europe as protectionist, unfriendly to trade, inwardlooking and bureaucratic developed in Australia throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century. This in turn fostered a certain lack of interest in and attention to the European integration process and its increasing global importance. Within the EU Commission, Australia was regarded for much of the past 40 years as interested only in agriculture. For the greater part of this period also, the close traditional, cultural, trade and foreign and security policy ties with the United Kingdom remained Australia’s sole broadly based and close link with Europe.

The defence policies of many countries in the world are in disarray. With the end of the Cold War, the United States and its NATO allies, as well as Russia and former members of the Warsaw Pact, are having great difficulties justifying their large defence forces. As a result, defence budgets are being slashed and force structures are being reoriented away from nuclear conflict and major conventional war. In Asia, however, strong economic growth is sustaining the largest increase in defence spending of any area of the world. This is taking place even though most countries in Asia face no palpable threat. Furthermore, few countries in the region have set out in the public domain reasoned arguments for their defence-force acquisitions. As a close ally of the United States and as an important regional power, how does Australia’s defence policy fit into these two divergent trends? Has Australia’s defence policy changed radically since the end of the Cold War? What about Australia’s economic and political engagement with Asia? Has it led to less anxiety in official circles about potential military threats from the north and has this resulted in any changes to the force structure?

With a focus on the African Union, this chapter examines the Security Council’s practices when interacting with regional organisations in collaborative peace operations. The Security Council plays a critical role in two ways: (i) it identifies security threats and the required responses, and it authorises UN missions to deal with them; and (ii) it determines the role, if any, to be played by regional organisations and authorises the action they can take to address threats to peace in their regions. Africa is both the site of conflicts that have necessitated UN peace operations or the Council’s authorisation of enforcement actions, as in Libya in 2011, and home to that regional organisation which has engaged the most with the United Nations in maintaining international peace and security. The overarching argument of this chapter is that – notwithstanding changes in the post-Cold-War international political landscape and the rise of other voices from the periphery – the status of the Security Council as custodian of the collective security system remains undiminished. Its centrality and primacy have not been challenged or usurped by the African Union or other regional organisations.

This chapter examines sub-systemic actor’s duties. It treats NATO as indicative of a collective defence organization and the European Union (before the Lisbon treaty that contains two collective defence clauses) as indicative of a collective security organization. This chapter argues that NATO has, if requested to help by a member country, a contractual (Article 5) – and thus overriding – duty to protect a member state, and when must cause is satisfied, with securitization. It is argued that Article 5 is now somewhat outdated and that – going forward – just reason (i.e., the existence of an objective existential threat) + macro-proportionality, and not armed attack, should be the threshold for collective political action. The obligation to use securitizing measures, however, rests with the satisfaction of must cause. This chapter also argues that in collective security organizations, the obligation to securitize insiders, rests with remedial responsibility triggered by ties of community/friendship, this means that unlike in collective defence organizations, the obligation to securitize insiders can be overridden.

This chapter seeks to delineate the notion of collective self-defence in international law. While the core concept can be stated relatively easily, there has been persistent controversy regarding the nature of collective self-defence. It is possible to identify no fewer than five different ‘conceptions’ of collective self-defence that have been advanced in scholarship. These conceptions are all explored in detail. The chapter also examines the question of whether collective self-defence is indeed an ‘inherent right’, as Article 51 of the United Nations Charter proclaims. The status of collective self-defence as a right (and, moreover, as a right that is inherent) has been contested. As such, its status requires theorisation based on the analysis of the views of states. Finally, the chapter considers the modality of collective self-defence: in other words, it asks what ‘qualifies’ as an act of collective self-defence. In examining this question, there is particular focus on whether the provision of weapons and logistical support in support of an attacked state amounts to the exercise of collective self-defence.

This chapter examines collective self-defence treaty arrangements. It engages with a diverse range of examples of the collective self-defence treaties (or treaties that contain collective self-defence aspects) that have emerged since 1945 to draw out common themes as to the nature, process, and role of such arrangements, as well as to establish notable variations. The aim is to contribute an overall picture of collective self-defence today specifically in the context of treaty relationships. The chapter argues that such relationships inevitably impose only weak obligations on their parties to defend each other and also can cause notable issues related to overlapping memberships, bureaucracy, and antagonism amongst members (amongst other difficulties). Equally, these arrangements – of which there are now hundreds – are concluded for good reason(s). They provide a range of benefits, especially in terms of their deterrent effect.