Brazil accompanied global mid-century changes with its own great transformation in 1850: three landmark laws on the slave trade, land, and commerce that in theory aligned state-building with market forces. Yet, if premised on colonization as a substitute for slavery, the country’s transformation was in fact a circuitous one, as abolitionists’, planters’ and the government’s own efforts pointed in different directions. As the illegal slave trade endured after 1850, Brazilian abolitionists organized a new association to promote model colonies built from the ground up, but their efforts paled in comparison to the private colonization undertaken by wealthy Paraíba Valley planters. Historians assume that this coffee-growing elite held sway over the Brazilian state, but their colonization approaches suggest otherwise. The imperial government was more interested in promoting myriad new colonization endeavors across the Empire, including in the northeastern provinces, and using colonization for its own geopolitical needs. Conflicting uses of colonization laid bare not only the failure of government-directed initiatives to appease divergent regional interests, but also the ways in which colonization complicated rather than facilitated a purported transition toward free labor and an alignment of state and market interests.

The different dynamics created by ceasefires discussed throughout this book challenge many of the basic, frequently unstated assumptions about how ceasefires are used as part of a particular political process that supposedly moves violence towards peace. This book argued that ceasefires are often not the humanitarian, purely positive or beneficial tools they have long been considered to be. In many cases, ceasefires are not simply a “cease fire’ but rather interject into complex contestations for control of the state. As such, this final chapter presents actionable recommendations for practitioners about how ceasefires interject into much broader and more complex processes. Ceasefires are not only used as military tools to stop violence but political tools actors in civil wars use for their own statebuilding ends. These ends are invariably much broader than winning or losing militarily and need to be considered when making decisions relating to, for example, mediation, foreign aid, humanitarian access, development, reconstruction, migration and refugee intakes.

From the 1950s to at least the 1970s, China established and operated a variety of intelligence networks from Switzerland. The chapter relies on thousands of files by the Federal Police as well as Chinese memoirs, biographies, commemorative volumes of former agents, and publications on the history of Chinese intelligence to discuss different forms of intelligence activities carried out by Chinese diplomats in Switzerland. Showing just how intertwined Chinese foreign policy and intelligence were, the chapter argues that diplomatic staff were so often also active as intelligence agents that it could be argued that the Chinese used a hybrid form of diplomat–agent in Switzerland. Some of the national, international, and transnational intelligence networks that the Chinese operated from Switzerland show that Switzerland functioned as a Chinese intelligence hub in Cold War Europe. These include a network of UN officials, ethnic Chinese students and scientists, Chinese restaurants, and Chinese Indonesians. The chapter also describes the Swiss Federal Police’s counterintelligence measures as a reaction to the Chinese intelligence activities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the development of Communist Chinese intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s in order to show how this contributed to Chinese intelligence activities in Europe.

The period 1929 to 1939 is a neglected period in the study of Irish-American and American-Irish diplomacy. It was bookmarked by two wars and characterised by unfettered US capitalism which extended to the international stage and it ended with a global war arising from the unchecked rise of fascism spreading from Germany. There is much to be learned about bilateral diplomatic relations during this period of peace and gestating crises including changes of government from W.T. Cosgrave to Éamon de Valera and Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1933 respectively. It argues that not only did leadership matter in the operation of diplomacy but also the role and character of the diplomat vital and that his family should be examined to decipher how 'soft diplomacy' operated at this time.

This chapter discusses the role of diplomats at the Congress of Vienna, with a specific focus on the British Foreign Secretary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. While accepting that Castlereagh, like all other diplomats, was motivated by a realist maximization of Britain’s interests, for which the talk of peace and cooperation tosome extent constituted mere rhetoric, the chapter emphasises how diplomats like Castlereagh were formed by the experiences and viewpoints they had accumulated over a long period of time. It was this political socialisation, notably shaped by the lengthy struggle against French Jacobinism and Bonapartism, that influenced Castlereagh’s beliefs about the most dangerous threats to the security of the Continent, and by implication, of Great Britain. These mixed beliefs informed his decision-making in ways that promoted both British interests and collective security and peace in the years after 1813.