This chapter examines the role of oil in the early Soviet period, analysing the importance Lenin and Stalin attached to this commodity for domestic development and international trade.

Despite its increasingly repressive institutions, Liberia enjoyed rapid economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. This was due in large part to the expansion of exports produced by foreign companies granted generous concessions by the Liberian government. The first major concession was in 1926 to the Firestone Rubber Company. Rubber exports were the main source of economic growth in the 1930s. This was followed after 1945 with numerous concessions in mining, forestry, and agriculture. This chapter compares Liberia’s economic history during this period with that of Mexico under the presidency of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911), which also grew rapidly through the attraction of foreign capital. While research on institutions and economic development has often stressed the importance of limited government, periods of economic growth haven often occurred under authoritarian governments through various means to create substitutes for limited government. Histories of Porfirio Diaz’s government have argued that a system of elite coordination and rent-seeking made contracts with foreign companies credible even in the absence of representative institutions. Ultimately, however, this system fractured with the beginning of the Mexican civil war. This chapter argues that a similar system operated in Liberia, and that the inability of the elite to integrate new members resulted in the overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime in 1980 and, ultimately, the beginning Liberia’s devastating civil wars.

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iran was the scene of competition and rivalry by the dominant global powers at the time, Britain and Russia, and later the Soviet Union. Iran managed to remain nominally independent under both the Qajars and the Pahlavis, but for long periods of time that independence was hardly meaningful. Over the course of the century that this chapter covers, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, the country experienced prolonged periods of foreign economic domination, political subjugation, and outright military occupation. Situated in a geography of increasing strategic significance, Iran was, in fact, one of the primary areas in which the Russians and the British played out a great game of high-stakes international chess, almost always to the detriment of local peoples and leaders.

Chapter 8 explains a process that is unique to the multilateral safeguard mechanism and that is sometimes misunderstood: the process of rebalancing. The chapter examines the conceptual questions that arise with the general notion of rebalancing as relating to a negotiation-derived consequence. It notes that the obligation of maintaining the balance of concessions informs the whole rebalancing exercise, in particular the consultations under Articles 8.1 and 12.3, the consideration of the means of compensation, and the notion of the withdrawal of substantially equivalent concessions and other obligations under the GATT 1994. The Chapter also explains the temporary suspension of the right to take rebalancing action under Article 8.2, and the natural tension that exists between the mandates of this provision and the conduct of dispute settlement proceedings under the DSU.

Target governments can reduce grievances among disaffected populations who might otherwise pledge support to a group. Incorporating this into the workhorse model, we show an unexpected relationship between the total number of groups and total violence observed. When few groups exist, the target state has little incentive to reduce grievances. Due to the lack of competition, the government calculates that paying that price in violence is worth offering fewer concessions. In contrast, when many groups exist, the competition instills great fear in the target state. As a result, it may calculate that entirely abandoning the objectionable policy is the best solution. Without any supporters to recruit, the groups then drop their violence outputs. Thus, violence may decrease in the number of competing groups because violence deters the government. We characterize the circumstances under which the deterrent effect dominates the competition effect and provide broader tips for the empirical literature on outbidding.

This chapter endogenizes a would-be militant group’s decision to enter the marketplace for violence. We show that an existing group may overproduce violence to corner the market and make its potential rivals calculate that recuperating their costs will be impossible. As a result, violence may be greater when we observe one group than when we observe many. We then investigate four ways in which a target government might mitigate the violence: offensive measures that undermine the lead group’s marginal cost of violence, defensive measures that absorb a portion of all violence, deterrent measures that increase the cost of group formation, and concessions to the group’s audience to reduce grievances. Of these, only specific types of defensive measures are guaranteed to decrease violence. In contrast, increasing the burden of entry and decreasing grievances can counterintuitively increase violence.

This chapter discusses the development of negative and positive human rights obligations under international human rights law (IHRL) and their applicability to hostage-taking. It is shown that the development of IHRL can be fundamental for the protection of the human rights of hostages, filling in the gaps left by jurisdiction in international law and state responsibility, as states have a duty to protect the human rights of hostages by adopting all possible measures to prevent hostage-taking; taking action to end the violations that hostages suffer at the hands of their abductors; investigating a hostage incident and rescue operation; and compensating the victims. Chapter 5 also discusses the jurisdictional limitations of the human rights framework which sit uncomfortably in the transboundary nature of hostage-taking. The second part of the chapter therefore reassesses the human rights obligations of states which operate beyond their borders in order to release hostages.

Chapter 6 will move the discussion from what obligations states have under IHRL to how states have to act in order to fulfil these obligations in practice. This chapter tests state practice against the human rights framework in order to evaluate whether states comply with their human rights obligations when they deal with hostage-taking. By drawing on a wide range of practice by states which have experienced terrorist attacks over the years as well as counter-piracy measures adopted by various states, this chapter seeks to improve our understanding of what states do in response to hostage-taking and how they can better incorporate the needs of hostages in their responses.

Chapter four looks at the development of the violent struggle and details the options the actors have available to deal with violent challenges. The causal mechanisms leading to escalation here focuses on a different set of shifts in saliency for the belligerents. The chapter shows that important escalatory potential can be found in the response of the state towards the sometimes only peaceful expression of opposition. The cases that are brought forward here are Northern Ireland and the Philippines in the 1970s, where escalation was triggered by the specific responses from the government.

Although colonial officials had very little money, their superiors nevertheless demanded that certain tasks be accomplished. In particular, they required labour. And since most Africans were uninterested in exchanging their labour for the special-use currencies the French were offering, labour had to be acquired through force. Manhunting therefore became colonial officials’ major undertaking during the colony’s early decades, particularly in the hunting zone. The cruelty of manhunting and of the way in which labour was squeezed from the captured comes across as scandalous today; it did for many at the time as well. Many Europeans involved with manhunting experienced the tension between the future-oriented goals justifying their presence and the actual practices they engaged in (or allowed, or did not punish) as conflicts of values. The conflicts stemmed in part from the multiple arenas in which they sought to be effective actors: how what happened in the Central African interior was perceived by imperial institutions and audiences, and the unfolding of interpersonal relations in the interior where manhunting was necessary to acquisition and exploitation. In neither arena was law much of a guide to action. Instead, ambitious colonial officials learned the skill of camouflage: managing the faces they showed to different audiences so that their practices would not stand out as questionable. Along the way, manhunts entrenched a simultaneously acquisitive and neglectful way of thinking about the value and status of other people.

East and Central Africa were among the last regions to be colonized by European powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to limited trade with the region, along with more fragmented indigenous political organization in many colonies, colonial governments faced a particularly challenging task of establishing fiscal systems which would support the conquest and rule of these territories. This chapter examines the ways they tried to overcome these difficulties, focusing on the histories of the Belgian Congo, Kenya, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Tanganyika and Uganda. In all of these, the imperial powers made use of older tools of colonial rule, including settlement and the outsourcing of government to chartered companies, but the implementation of these were shaped by the circumstances of the period. The chapter argues that these early policies influenced the development of both taxation and public spending during and after the colonial period. In particular, colonial and post-independence governments were more dependent on direct taxation, and faced fierce debates about the distribution of public spending.