Some years ago, I was involved in a community organizing coalition called London Citizens and its response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The coalition, which addressed issues ranging from street safety to the need for a living wage, was made up of churches, mosques, synagogues, trade unions, schools, resident associations, and universities. In the wake of the crisis, the coalition engaged in a process of listening to the folk who were part of the membership institutions to hear how the crisis, and the economic recession that came in its aftermath, was affecting them and what issues needed to be addressed. What became clear was that many were negatively affected by extortionate rates of interest charged by credit card companies, banks, and subprime lenders who at the same time were being bailed out by taxpayers’ money.

This chapter focuses on a particular type of commitment problem known as preventive war. When one side slowly grows more powerful over time, the declining state may prefer fighting a costly war in the present to enduring an efficient but disadvantaged peace later. However, the basic version of this logic only works when states cannot control their future power levels. If they can, and the opponent can monitor those decisions, peace prevails. Moreover, the states may wish to negotiate no power shift whatsoever to avoid paying the costs of weapons.

This chapter introduces the commitment problem. In some cases, states may recognize the existence of mutually preferable settlements. However, one or both may be unable to credibly commit to the conditions necessary to implement those settlements. As a result, the states fight. In particular, this chapter’s focus is on how power dynamics can create such commitment problems.

It is a sad and depressing reality that, for any international lawyer interested and working in the field of international law governing the use of military force by and between states (the ‘jus ad bellum’), business tends to be bad during moments of relative peace and stability. Arguably even more depressing, however, is the fact that this is not often the case.

Previous chapters treated war as a game-ending decision. In practice, negotiations may continue even if the first round of bargaining fails. This chapter covers three different versions of the problem. First, we see that states can learn directly from who wins or loses on the battlefield. Second, states can implicitly learn based on the differential costs of war two types pay. Finally, against multiple bargaining opponents, accepting small proposals can signal weakness for future negotiations. Rather than always lead to more war, it is possible that this instead causes the first proposers to be more generous. Overall, we see that these models are substantially more difficult to work with because of the manipulation of beliefs throughout the rounds of negotiations.

When most of us hear the word “politics” we think of either fights between political parties, fractious policy debates, or a manipulative and self-interested form of negotiation expressed in the phrase “they’re playing politics with the issue.” But underneath the polarization, rage tweets, and backroom deals is the reality that politics is the description of a moral and existential good. Politics embodies the recognition that some kind of common life with others must be cultivated and sustained over time if life is to go on.

Intimacy is a basic building block of a flourishing life. A lack of intimacy and the resulting loneliness and sense of isolation can cause dire physical, mental, and public health problems that in turn diminish our ability to act with and for others.1 This chapter begins by focusing on intimacy in general, which then frames a more specific focus on sexual intimacy and the intimacies of home. My argument is that vulnerability is an inherent feature of creatureliness that can be metabolized in ways that produce either intimacy or precarity. On my account, intimacy is a moral relation that specifies what love and justice mean in practice.

What is generally true about all models of crisis bargaining? Answering a question like this seems daunting because there are infinitely many ways states could negotiate with one another. Fortunately, this chapter introduces a new tool to address the question: mechanism design. We see that types with higher war payoffs will always fight more often than types with lower payoffs, and they will receive better payoffs overall. Meanwhile, it is possible to have negotiations end with guaranteed peace under uncertainty over costs, but no such solution may be possible with uncertainty over power.

When my family and I moved to the United States, my eldest son had never played or seen a game of basketball. He was not even that interested in sports. But on arrival, he was invited to join a neighborhood recreational team. That opportunity awakened a love for the game that then became his passion until he went to university. As it turned out, being a serious basketball player in North Carolina is not a trivial matter. It structured much of his life, including how he experienced school, our town, the intersections of gender, class, and race, as well as his own physical development. However, there was neither an identity nor a way of acting as a basketball player that was somehow hidden inside him waiting to jump out.

Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who combined her own experience of slavery, empirical evidence about slavery, and a fervent theological vision to summon others to change. As she put it: “The Lord has made me a sign unto this nation, an’ I go round a-testifyin’, an’ showin’ on ’em their sins agin my people.”1 Sojourner Truth prophetically revealed what was going on as a prelude to demanding that those who heard her change how they lived and then join with her to abolish the system of slavery. She was a witness.

Chapter 5 has as its focus not the institution of peacekeeping per se, but more specifically the use of force within, and as a now an integral part of, United Nations peacekeeping. It begins by attempting to define UN peacekeeping, given its absence from the UN Charter, and goes on to address the legal basis for peacekeeping operations and the basic principles of peacekeeping. The chapter then traces the development of peacekeeping, from the early UN Charter-era operations, which saw the establishment of the basic principles, through to the challenges to these principles, which did not take long to manifest themselves, in particular through the use of forcible measures by peacekeeping forces. Finally, the chapter examines the evolution of the use of force within peacekeeping missions, from simple self-defence to the implementation and enforcement of robust mandates, and assesses not only whether the various forms of forcible peacekeeping can be reconciled with the fundamental principles of peacekeeping, but also whether peacekeeping has now taken on a war-fighting role.

This chapter explores the second main source of uncertainty in crisis bargaining: power. At first, the results appear to be superficially similar to how uncertainty over costs works. However, upon deeper inspection, uncertainty over power is harder to mitigate. Even a clever mediator might struggle to solve the problem. Further, states have an incentive to strategically create such uncertainty for their opponents because free riding by not constructing weapons is a tempting choice.

This appendix provides a brief overview of how to calculate and manipulate infinite streams of payoffs.