This chapter espouses a hybrid approach to the Security Council’s mechanisms for maintaining international peace, looking at the interactions between politics and law. It examines how politics among great powers affect the Security Council. It describes the effect of the changing landscape of power politics on its workings both historically and in the present. The chapter investigates how the Security Council deals with novel threats, and it discusses the contributions a more powerful China may make to the Security Council and to international peace. It reflects on the Security Council’s trajectory by revisiting universal and regional approaches to the maintenance of peace. Three core arguments are presented: (i) while more legal regulations need to be explored to reduce the negative impact of power politics, any legal design must have due regard for power politics; (ii) while a universal approach should be maintained, regional arrangements should play a bigger part in the maintenance of international peace; and (iii) a more powerful China can both enable and disable the Security Council.

Chapter 5 illuminates systematically – in a European, transatlantic and global context – not only the prehistory of the July crisis of 1914 but also the decisive longer-term changes in the international system and ground-rules and assumptions of international politics that led to the outbreak of the Great War. Challenging long-standing interpretations as well as the recently influential notion that European leaders acted like “sleepwalkers”, it underscores that what really proved decisive were two crucial developments: on one level, the final demise of the European concert as a key mechanism for peaceful conflict-resolution and the emergence of two antagonistic alliance blocs; and, on a more fundamental level, processes that led those who made the key decisions in and before 1914 to “unlearn” what was required, not merely to defuse continual crises at the eleventh hour but actually to manage the core systemic challenges of the age of imperialism and preserve peace more effectively. It thus seeks to show in a new way why by 1914 the escalation of a general conflict, which then widened into the First World War, had become all but unavoidable.

Chapter 2 illuminates the transformation of the European and global international system in the first decades of the “long” 20th century (1860–1914). It analyses how the turn towards ever more uncompromising power politics, the emergence of modern states and the intensification of ever more unlimited imperialist competition between older and aspiring world powers – essentially, the European great powers, the United States and Japan – came to recast Europe and the world. It throws into relief how this competition and the rise of dominant imperialist, militarist and “civilisational Darwinist” doctrines and assumptions not only led to the creation of a new global hierarchy characterised by unprecedented inequalities between imperial world states, smaller states and those who were subjected to different forms of informal imperialist domination and formal colonisation. And it offers new perspectives on how the confluence of European balance-of-power practices and escalating global rivalries successively corroded international peace.

This chapter reviews the three case studies in terms of six areas of comparison: power politics, hierarchy, peaceful coexistence, international political economy, territoriality/transnationalism, and modes of thinking. It observes a spectrum with China and hierarchy at one end, Europe and anarchy at the other, and India and the Islamic world in between. It notes how the thinking and practice of the past are as relevant in the three case studies as they are in Europe and charts out the similarities and differences among the cases, how they compare with Western IR, and how this provides the foundations for a more pluralist, global discipline of International Relations.

In this concluding chapter, Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann sum up the volume’s contribution to the discipline of international relations and the study of international order, and suggest how the goods substitution framework may be extended in future research. Moving beyond a contractual view of goods substitution, they emphasize how identity could play a central role in goods ecologies, particularly in instances where a goods recipient uses its own resources to coproduce the goods with the provider as a means of gaining recognition and relevance. In turn, the quality and perceptions of goods and assets are also likely to play a part in a global goods ecology.

The central focus of this chapter is on variations in Atwood’s perennial theme of sexual power politics, with extensive analysis of early poems in The Circle Game, Power Politics, and Bodily Harm, developing into an extended exploration of the interface between power politics in the personal and public worlds in The Handmaid’s Tale with its current sociopolitical relevance for women’s rights and human rights. This chapter concludes with an interpretation of The Heart Goes Last, reading it through Ahmed’s theory of affectivity, eliding personal and wider political resonances.