Humans have the ability to recognize that when they perform actions, they produce effects in the external world. Even though humans are not the only animalsl with this mental capacity, their ability to perform actions is accompanied by a feeling of authorship, a feeling that “I” am the one who did it. This is what academics have called the sense of agency. When individuals claim reduced responsibility because they were “only obeying orders”, this defense is often viewed with skepticism, because the defendant has a clear motive of avoiding punishment. However, scientific methods can now be used to investigate the experience of receiving orders and how it influences how the brain processes information. As this chapter shows, obeying orders impacts the sense of agency and the feeling of responsibility at the brain level. Further, working and living in some highly hierarchical and sometimes coercive social structures, such as the military, can also impact the sense of agency when people make decisions. It thus appears that hierarchies provide a powerful ground to obtain a reduced feeling of responsibility and agency in individuals.

When we witness another person experiencing pain, be it emotional or physical, we have an empathic reaction. And even if we commit a harmful action against another person, we most of the time experience guilt in the aftermath, which prevents us from performing the same action in the future. Guilt and empathy are critical moral emotions that together usually prevent us from harming others. However, as this chapter shows, systematic processes of classification and dehumanization at play before a genocide can alter moral emotions towards another part of the population. Activity in empathy-related brain regions is generally reduced towards individuals that we consider as outgroup or towards dehumanized individuals. Neuroscience studies have further shown that when obeying orders to hurt another person, neural activity in empathy- and guilt-related brain regions is reduced compared to acting freely. Such results show how obeying orders diminishes our aversion to harming others.

In this chapter, I discuss in what sense and to what extent institutions have political authority. I take institutions with legitimate authority to be justified in wielding political power, where this political power is backed by the threat of coercion. Against the position that international institutions are not coercive, I claim that applying an adequate conception of coercion – which takes the concept of enforcement as paradigmatic for coercion, rather than the concept of pressure – enables us to understand some international institutions as coercive. It also lays open the assumption that a single conception of authority applied to all international institutions misconceives the diversity in aims and purposes of international institutions. Institutions that coordinate morally mandatory aims and institutions that coordinate mutual advantage can both be plausibly understood as coercive, even though their authority differs in scope and in what standards they must satisfy. Finally, I discuss whether the standard of state consent is appropriate for international institutions: while it is plausible for institutions that coordinate mutual advantage, it is implausible as a standard of legitimacy for institutions that coordinate morally mandatory aims – such as institutions of international criminal justice.

This chapter lays out a novel theory of elite cohesion, coercive capacity, and authoritarian social order. Enabling and controlling coercive agents is a fundamental challenge confronting all dictators. Actors like secret police chiefs pose a grave threat to incumbent authoritarian elites because they hold the means of violence and could use them to overthrow their masters. Elites’ task of monitoring and controlling their coercive agents is a collective action problem. All members of an authoritarian ruling coalition are better off if they cooperate to control coercive agents. However, individual authoritarian elites have incentives to defect from cooperation. When authoritarian elites cannot cooperate to prevent insubordination by coercive agents, they reduce coercive capacity. Institutions promote authoritarian elite cohesion. They provide structures of shared expectations or focal points that allow authoritarian elites to pool their resources, cooperate, and control coercive agents. In Cold War communist Central and Eastern Europe, Stalinism was the institutional structure that promoted elite cohesion and led to the construction of large, capable coercive institutions across the region.

This chapter examines the meaning of a ‘use of force’ under article 2(4) of the UN Charter, focusing on its required effects, gravity and intention. It analyses the required type of effects, namely, whether they must be physical, the required object/target, the required level of directness between the act and its harmful effects, and if temporary or potential effects count. With respect to gravity, it argues there is no de minimis threshold for a ‘use of force’ under article 2(4) but that gravity is nonetheless relevant to the contextual requirement that the act be in ‘international relations’ and is an indicative element of a ‘use of force’. Finally, it analyses whether a particular intention is required for a ‘use of force’ under article 2(4), examining accident, mistake and coercive and hostile intent. This section considers the relationship between the prohibitions of the ‘threat’ and ‘use’ of force, the non-intervention principle and the object and purpose of article 2(4). It concludes that like gravity, a coercive or hostile intent is relevant to the contextual requirements of article 2(4) and is an indicative element of a ‘use of force’.

In this conclusion, I draw broader lessons for the study of authoritarian regimes from the analyses of this book. I call for greater attention to coercive institutions by scholars of authoritarian politics, and for authoritarian regimes to be theorized as groups rather than unitary actors. I briefly discuss the applicability of my theoretical argument to the Chinese case. Under Mao Zedong, breakdown of elite cohesion during the Cultural Revolution was associated with a decline in the capacity of the Ministry of Public Security. This mirrors reductions in coercive capacity after post-Stalinist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe.

This introduction lays out the problem of enabling and controlling coercive agents under authoritarian regimes. It describes puzzling variation in the size and activities of coercive institutions across six regimes in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The theoretical approach of the book is briefly discussed, emphasizing elite cohesion over political threats. The research design, plan, and empirical findings of the book are discussed.

I argue in Chapter 3 that the canon law precept of the marriage debt, which was formulated particularly by Augustine, Gratian, and Thomas Aquinas in the course of establishing marriage as a sacrament, indicates a mode by which power is exercised on and through the bodies and the wills of married parties. It is a mode by which individuals are enjoined to a voluntary subservience. The power that the loathly lady figure wields over the penitent knight in The Wife of Bath’s Tale leaves its subject formally free but freely compliant, aiming at the production of internal conditions rather than external constraints. The same dynamic shapes the plots of other medieval texts featuring the marriage debt, from Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale to the tales told on Days 2 and 8 of Boccaccio’s Decameron, all of which I consider as illustrative analogues. These texts identify marriage, and marital sex in particular, as a key site where debt makes subjects, where political power is enacted in and through the free wills of human beings.

Bayle invites us to reflect on the psychological effects of conformity on the dissenter himself, forced to violate his conscience, as well as the counter-intuitive implications of this infringement. Bayle suggests that infringements on conscience are experienced as deep violations by the dissenter, arguably just as unsettling as more violent forms of discipline and coercion. The experience of conforming to the state religion does not merely corrode mutual understanding among citizens but asks individuals to endure the taxing experience of suppressing and violating their consciences. Hypocritical conformity is not merely a trivial demand with little consequence for their integrity, as advocates of religious persecution insist, but a deeply felt violation that reverberates even long after the act of conformity is finished. Even more discerningly, Bayle recognizes that hypocritical conformity exacerbates conscientious fervor. Hypocritical conformity does not merely fail to inspire genuine conversion; it also radicalizes dissenters and urges them to be even more committed to their conscience. In an attempt to transform dissenters through hypocritical conformity, the state risks emboldening dissenters even further and inciting backlash against the state.

In 1999, a Bangladeshi woman claimed she had been enslaved by the Second Secretary of the Bahrain Mission to the United Nations in New York City and his wife.1 After signing a contract, in which she agreed to work for their household as a domestic servant, she stated her passport was confiscated by the couple, and she was left to care for their children and perform household duties that held her in near involuntary servitude2 – akin to trafficking in persons. In response, the defendants claimed to be protected by diplomatic immunity that makes serving diplomats exempt from the jurisdiction of foreign courts. Although the case was eventually settled for an undisclosed amount of damages that the Bahrani couple paid to the domestic worker,3 in its statement of interest, the US Department of State categorically emphasized that serving diplomats and their family members hold immunity from suit in the United States for both official and private acts.

Chapter 7 briefly recaps the cost-balancing theory and arguments, extends the theory to other issue areas in Chinese foreign policy and the behavior of other states, and finally discusses the implications of this book for the study of international relations and Chinese foreign policy. Building upon existing research on coercion, reputation and credibility, and economic interdependence, this book proposed the cost-balancing theory to explain China’s coercion calculus. The book has implications for understanding China’s grand strategy and predicting China’s future trajectories. Furthermore, this book adds to the burgeoning literature that looks beyond purely military coercive instruments by analyzing how a rising China utilizes nonmilitarized coercion and what drives its decision to choose between military and nonmilitary tools. This book, therefore, contributes to theorizing coercion in an era of global economic interdependence. It sheds new light on policy implications for understanding China’s grand strategy, managing China’s rise, and avoiding great power conflicts, while pointing out potential pathways where the cost-balancing theory can be applied to non-China cases.

Chapter 4 focuses on Chinese coercion in the East China Sea, where China has maritime territorial and jurisdictional disputes with Japan. I explain the trend of Chinese coercion in the East China Sea while conducting two in-depth case studies: the Sino-Japan boat clash incident of 2010 and the incident of Senkaku nationalization in 2012. As the cost-balancing theory argues, the costs and benefits of coercion explain when and how China coerces. In the pre-2005 period, the need to establish resolve was generally low, whereas the economic cost was high. China, therefore, refrained from coercion. The need to establish resolve was briefly higher in 1996 and 1997, but China did not utilize coercion in these cases because of its equally high need for resolve and high economic costs. Because the East China Sea is not China’s core interest, its issue importance is not sufficiently high to justify the use of coercion. When the need to establish a reputation for resolve is high and the economic cost low, China used coercion, as seen in the post-2005 trend and, in particular, the 2010 and 2012 cases. It refrained using from military coercion for fear of potential geopolitical backlash.