For the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. For many children, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany. The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” These children had particular difficulties reintegrating into the Turkish school system, and both the Turkish and West German media regularly emphasized the “liberal,” “democratic” education in Germany in contrast to an allegedly “authoritarian” education in Turkey. Although West German policymakers were initially relieved to export the burden of integrating these children to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Though twisted in the service of racism, this sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany.

This chapter introduces the concept and practice of security in international relations. It explores the dilemmas faced by states, individuals and the global community by first looking at contemporary crises and disagreements about security; second, examining how security has been differently defined and focused; and third, surveying how different theoretical approaches have understood and analysed security.

Liberalism is at the heart of modern ‘Western’ history, politics, and international relations. Central to understandings of liberty, freedom, democracy, rights and the rule of law, liberalism has animated debates on abolition and empire, war and peace. This chapter provides an account of liberalism as a contested phenomena that originated at least in the eighteenth century and has had profound international political consequences ever since. To tell this story, the chapter begins by considering how to make sense of the contestations surrounding liberalism, before examining how and why liberalism matters to International Relations at key moments of its development as a discipline: in the age of empires, the inter-war years, during the Cold War and ‘new’ world which ensued, and now in this epoch of endless war.

This chapter introduces a new research program on the politics of religion and secularism. A focus on the politics of religion and secularism offers a productive port of entry into the study of international politics. Following a brief introduction to religion and international relations, it offers a basic introduction to the concept of secularism, explains why the politics of secularism is significant to the study of global politics and concludes with a discussion of the politics of secularism in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79.

This chapter reflects on the tradition of Western political thought known as realism. Its main purpose is to identify who realists are, and to explain what realism is in the study of international relations. The first part of the chapter introduces students to some important thinkers, both ancient and modern, ascribed to the realist tradition. It also identifies two broad strands of realist thought: ‘classical’ and ‘structural’ or ‘neorealist’. The second part investigates attempts to conceive realism as a unified theory and practice of international relations. It highlights realism’s central concepts of the state and anarchy before reflecting on realism’s normative dimension.

The law adopts a cliff-edge approach to capacity, drawing a bright line between those who are deemed to have the capacity to make a decision and those who are not. This reflects Enlightenment ideas about the limits of legitimate state authority, according to which substantial justification is required before the state can interfere with the autonomous choices of its citizens. Given its role in distinguishing those who are capable of making autonomous choices (to whom the state defers) from those who are not, it is generally assumed that the test for capacity must be neutral as to the substance of the values, beliefs, or reasons underpinning any given decision, so as to leave proper space for individual autonomy. As a result, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 adopts a process-orientated account of capacity, which focuses on whether certain of the person’s cognitive capacities are intact, and not on the outcome of the decision, or on the substance or origins of values or beliefs which underpin it.

The chapter analyses how the political and economic realities of the aftermath of the First World War gave the term ‘tax justice’ a new meaning in Belgium, occupied during four years by Germany, but also how it was fought over for moral and economic reasons during the 1920s. On the left of the political spectrum, the Socialists brought their own fiscal agenda, entailing new progressive income taxes on the wealthy. On the right, Liberals and Catholics disapproved of such innovations, judging them morally wrong and economically harmful. Compromises were found, with a real shift in the tax system. However, as the 1920s wore on, the Belgian franc suffered from a depreciation like the French and German currencies, with capital fleeing the country. The political debate on progressive income taxes shifted from justice to injustice: the massive level of tax fraud and tax evasion was making the system unfair towards honest taxpayers. Tax policies made in the name of social justice became an achievement to be defended for some and an excessive ideal to be attenuated for others.

Reciprocity beliefs represent a challenge for researchers. Chapter 4 found a puzzling and robust correlation between reciprocity beliefs, on the one hand, and liberal–authoritarian values (LAVs), on the other. Chapter 10 argues that, underpinning the correlation between reciprocity beliefs and LAVs, it is hypothesized, is a disagreement over how to best respond to social dilemmas. People with more authoritarian response patterns to LAV items have a preference for maximizing cooperation by minimizing instances in which people who free ride on the collective effort unfairly walk away unpunished. People with more liberal values have a preference for minimizing instances in which people are unfairly punished despite being cooperators. In a discursive context, rich are more concerned about moral hazard, welfare abuse, and opportunistic behavior; people with more authoritarian response patterns will be more likely to incorporate such claims into their own basket of fairness considerations; and people with more liberal response patterns will be more likely to resist them. Chapter 10 provides evidence in support of this argument.

In this intriductory chapter, we outline the overarching psychological and sociopolitical conspiracy belief framework. This framework is elaborated through a figure and principles that integrate important prior research contributions and advance new ones.

This chapter introduces the context and objectives of the book. International criminal law is still a relatively new body of criminal law, that was constructed in a rapid transnational conversation. The time is ripe for careful systematic and normative evaluation of this corpus of law. For example, scholars have noted that some doctrines may contradict fundamental principles of justice that the system claims to uphold. The book proceeds in three steps: it explains a problem, it outlines a solution, and then it demonstrates the solution through application.

The first, preliminary, objective of the book is to demonstrate a problem. Namely, the book highlights the need for an additional type of reasoning in criminal law: ‘deontic’ reasoning, which is different from doctrinal or teleological reasoning, and engages directly with principled constraints such as the legality and culpability principles.

Second, the book outlines a method for deontic reasoning, and in particular for identifying fundamental principles. ICL poses several special challenges for identifying the appropriate principles. The book advances a liberal, open-minded, humanistic, and coherentist approach (and explains each of these features).

Third, the book dissects current controversies in command responsibility in order to demonstrate the method, its questions, and the insights it can generate.

In this chapter, I outline how the approach I have can raise new questions, both for ICL and for general criminal law theory.

The study of extreme cases can unsettle and refine our understandings of the principles developed in everyday experience. I will show how studying ICL problems may require us to unpack the roles traditionally played by ‘the State’ in criminal law thinking, and to re-examine many familiar tools of criminal law thought (such as ‘community’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘authority’). The criminal law theory of ICL might draw on ‘cosmopolitanist’ scholarship, which contemplates forms of governance other than the state, and which is therefore particularly challenging for mainstream criminal law thinking.

I will also highlight ‘promising problems’ in ICL. Exploring such problems can help us refine ICL doctrines and also make contributions to mainstream criminal law theory. These include: legality without a legislature; a humanistic account of duress and social roles; and superior orders and state authority. I will then do an even deeper delve into a selected set of controversies in Chapters 6 to 8, in order to demonstrate the method at work and thereby clarify the method, the work it can do, and the themes it raises.

In this chapter, I demonstrate the problem to which the rest of this book proposes a solution: namely, the need for more careful deontic reasoning. I will focus on certain distinctive habits of reasoning that have often recurred in ICL, which have a tendency to undermine compliance with deontic principles.

All legal systems sometimes generate doctrines that appear to conflict with stated principles. However, in national systems, the clash tends to be openly between liberal principles and ‘law and order’ considerations. I argue that ICL discourse often features an additional and interesting dynamic. In ICL, the distortions often result from habits of reasoning that are progressive and appropriate in human rights law and humanitarian law, but which become problematic when transplanted without adequate reflection to a criminal law system. I highlight three kinds of such reasoning: interpretive assumptions, substantive and structural assumptions, and ideological assumptions. These habits of reasoning were more prevalent in the early days of the renaissance of ICL than they are today. It is still valuable to discern and dissect these habits of reasoning, because their legacy continues, because they still recur today, and because they help show the value of attending to reasoning.

This chapter provides context for the study as a whole, situating the development of the civil war regime within the evolution of the international law of armed conflict. The chapter considers the classical, mediaeval and enlightenment manifestations of the legal distinction between international and internal armed conflict. It then discusses the rise and fall of the doctrines of belligerency and insurgency, the Lieber Code, and the establishment and early activities of the ICRC, before surveying the development of the law of armed conflict from the late 19th century until the Second World War. The chapter then considers the development of the civil war regime between 1949 and 1998 and subsequently, highlighting the key elements of the regime and setting these in the broader international legal context, including the development of international human rights law and international criminal law.

This chapter focuses on tests of the relationship between power sharing and the transition to minimalist democracy in the aftermath of civil war. We begin by explaining the need to account empirically for the effect that difficult post-conflict environments may have on countries’ ability to make a transition to democracy. We then conduct an empirical test of our central hypothesis regarding the existence of a positive relationship between extensive power sharing and the transition to minimalist democracy in post-civil war states. Finally, seeking to respond to critics who argue that power sharing impedes the development of forms of democracy that might be considered more “aspirational” than minimalist democracy, we examine the effects that power sharing has on democratization two, five, and ten years after the end of civil war using V-Dem’s measures of electoral, liberal, and egalitarian democracy.