The aim of this book is to make sense of reluctance in world politics and to explain its causes. In order to assess the explanatory power of my theorization of reluctance, I chose to focus on particularly ‘hard’ cases, in which we would generally not expect to see a reluctant behaviour in foreign policy: on states that are particularly powerful in their regions, and, more specifically, on how they address and manage regional crises. The underlying idea is that we would expect such countries to have an inherent interest in the stabilization of their respective regions, and therefore to engage in regional crisis management in a coherent and decisive manner. However, we actually observe variation: while Brazil was not reluctant in regional crisis management during the years of the first presidency of Lula da Silva, both India and Germany were reluctant regional crisis managers, even in periods of domestic political stability. The analyses in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 reveal that the explanations for the emergence of reluctance developed in Chapter 3 go a long way towards explaining the regional crisis management policies adopted by powerful states: in the cases analysed, reluctance emerged because of a combination of difficulties in preference formation (mostly driven by internal struggles and lack of coordination among different agencies and/or normative disagreements) and competing expectations by external actors.

But can the theory of reluctance developed in this book also be applied to other cases, actors or issue areas? In other words, does it have an explanatory power beyond the cases analysed in this book? This chapter addresses these questions by focusing on (1) different types of crisis; (2) different countries such as small states and great powers, with reluctance being particularly puzzling for the latter; and (3) different types of actors beyond the nationstate. Given space constraints, the following sections will necessarily be less detailed and rely more on secondary sources as compared to the in-depth case studies of the previous chapters. Overall, as we will see, the explanations for reluctance developed in this book are also helpful to make sense of reluctant policies in a broad range of different contexts.