This chapter briefly recapitulates the main findings of the book. In addition, it provides a discussion whether major current developments – such as climate change – make modifications in constitutional emergency provisions necessary. It also discusses the relationship between independent agencies (such as central banks) and emergency provisions. Finally, it asks how resilience can be improved.

The brief concluding chapter begins with an anecdote from the Life of Caesarius raising issues of lower-class agency in a context of shifting power structures. It proceeds to reflect upon the key questions at the heart of the book, including the relationship between popular culture and the ‘end of antiquity’.

Chapter 16 provides the conclusions and discusses why the book is relevant and its unique contribution to the literature on the use of force.

Policy evaluation has great potential to enhance polycentric climate governance, but that potential has not yet been fully realized. This concluding chapter draws together the key contributions of the book, which not only emerge from significant theoretical development, but also from a novel empirical analysis that is the first to investigate policy evaluation in the polycentric setting of the EU, as well as in Germany and in the United Kingdom. Future research should further explore causal drivers of the emergence of policy evaluation in polycentric governance systems, and unpack the actual use of knowledge in policy-making, a difficult, but necessary area of inquiry going forward. Additional aspects of polycentric governance theory, such as the role of evaluation in building trust and generating linkages between different actors, should also be explored. The collective research and climate governance endeavor will continue—this book has offered some new directions in which the journey may advance.

This study explores the pragmatics and metapragmatics of elasticity via elastic language in online medical information delivery as a way of avoiding miscommunication. Moreover, an evaluative dimension that extends beyond the viewpoint of the analyst is incorporated into pragmatics, by investigating participants’ feedback on the use of EL, which triangulate the findings of this study. From a cross-cultural (Australia and Taiwan) perspective, this study presents an account of harmony and disharmony between professional medical websites and the potential users of these websites. This study finds that elastic language performed eleven first- and second-order functions. Elastic language was preferred more by the Taiwanese participants than by the Australians. The findings further develop the elasticity theory by adding a metapragmatic dimension, inform and assist the online writer to successfully develop healthcare literacy, and make online medical information credible and suitable for public education.

In this concluding chapter, we delineate theoretical insights drawn from relevant comparisons among the case studies and suggest policy recommendations. Specifically, we reassess the three hypotheses, identify and map relevant patterns from the different case studies across several regions of the world, offer several policy recommendations based on these patterns, and draw some general conclusions. In addition to the observable patterns as related to type of borders, political and institutional arrangements, and political economy, in the perusal of the eleven case studies we identified two additional elements that further explain the reality of peaceful borders and illicit transnational flows: the geopolitical location of regions and subregions, as hubs for transnational illicit flows; and the legacy of civil and intermestic wars. In the last part of the chapter, we suggest several policy recommendations: (1) be aware of the normative dilemmas of human security; (2) increase cooperation and develop effective mechanisms of governance at all the possible levels; and (3) promote and prefer peace rather than war, but be aware of its potential unintended consequences.

This chapter concludes the argument of the book with a final comparison to Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology; challenges to theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars; and suggests further avenues for research.

The final chapter summarizes the book’s findings, evaluates its contributions to the study of post-conflict democracy as well as the limitations of the research, assesses policy implications, and suggests additional avenues for future research.

Finally, a conclusion draws everything together, largely on a theoretical level. Is there any such thing today as a hunter-gatherer? Can the positivist notion of ethnic groups as discreet entities ever be justified, especially in light of self-definition, multilingualism, long-term social change and intermarriage? Is a deep history implied in Bushman studies, for example in the retention of religious ideas from one end of southern Africa to the other? Are there theories that might help, such as ‘regional structural comparison’ (employed in some of my earlier work)? We know that the various groups are linked linguistically as a Sprachbund (a set of languages related through convergence, rather than through common descent). Might this have implications for the study of ethnicity? Language history? Indeed, are relations between southern Africa and other parts of the continent implicated too?