Tencent’s well-known ‘horse racing’ programme, launched two decades ago, encourages multiple teams to independently and proactively develop similar products, fostering competition for internal resources and more innovation efforts. This approach has led to major innovative and successful products like WeChat and Honor of Kings. This chapter argues that Tencent’s innovation thrives on a dynamic mix of internal competition and cooperation – what we term ‘coopetition’. While often overlooked by scholars and underestimated by business leaders, coopetition at Tencent has proven central to generating creative ideas, energising teams, and enabling cross-functional knowledge recombination. Remarkably, this process was not designed by executives through a top-down mechanism but rather happened naturally from Tencent’s culture of autonomy and tolerance for risk. Rich interview evidence reveals how coopetition enhances individual growth, team development, and product competitiveness, contributing to Tencent’s overall innovation capacity.

This volume sets out to provide a concise and accessible overview of the history of today’s European Union. A brief account of such a sprawling topic obviously cannot be comprehensive. Instead, I hope to lay out the broad sweep of developments, without getting bogged down in the details. These days all the EU’s significant moves are documented online, including all its treaties, major decisions, national positions, specific policies, and other technicalities. The institutions themselves provide deep insights into their ongoing work, often also supplying snapshots of historical developments. Even more importantly, there are entire libraries of books on specific policies and the roles of institutional actors such as the European Commission, the Parliament, the Council, and the various member states. Amidst such a wealth of information, it is all too easy to get tangled up in the details. In response, this book seeks to provide a coherent survey of the EU’s history for the general reader.

The media tends to portray a European Union lurching from one crisis to the next. And in this brief history I have had plenty to say about problems, dangers, risks, and threats in the decades-long process of European integration. The founders were well aware of this aspect. Jean Monnet always believed that ‘Europe would be built through crisis, and that it would be the sum of their solutions’. Indeed, the European Union – as the European Communities before it – does seem to have a knack for turning crises to its advantage. Rather than leading to any kind of reversal, challenges have tended to reorient and expand the European project. So, we should not get carried away by excitable headlines, which often fail to do justice to the EU’s complex and sometimes contradictory trajectory.

Chapter 4 considers how duties of international cooperation safeguard sovereign equality by reconciling the territorial sovereignty of coastal states with landlocked states’ rights to access the oceans through negotiation or binding arbitration.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that states have accepted obligations of mandatory cooperation with respect to a variety of other transboundary harms, including piracy, terrorism, and at least some cyberattacks.

Chapter 13 concludes by recapping the book’s key themes, considering potential obstacles to mandatory cooperation, and identifying other matters of international concern, such as pandemics, that are good candidates for mandatory cooperation under the equitable conception of sovereign equality.

Chapter 10 examines whether states bear duties of international cooperation with respect to forced migration, including the mass displacement caused by Myanmar’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against its Rohingya Muslim minority. It makes the case that the international community has accepted the protection of forced migrants as a common concern of humanity under the community’s joint stewardship.

Chapter 1 draws on the history of Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine to distinguish two conceptions of sovereign equality under international law. It argues that that international law in the twentieth century embraced a constitutional and equitable conception of sovereign equality, generating state obligations to cooperate with one another to resolve disputes over matters of common concern in accordance with equitable principles.

While the environment almost always suffers in conflict, it can also present opportunities for cooperation – this is the key premise and promise of environmental peacebuilding. Harnessing shared environmental risks and challenges for collective and cooperative action has the potential to foster relationship development that can prevent conflict and/or restore peace. Environmental peacebuilding and methods of intervention, such as impact assessments and peace agreements, have the potential to be an antidote to any or all of the environment-conflict intersections. This chapter explores the literature on environmental peacebuilding and key tools of the trade.

Chapter 3 shows how the international law of the sea moved away from state unilateralism in favor of the equitable model of sovereignty by requiring states to resolve disputes over international fisheries and maritime boundaries through cooperation in accordance with equitable principles.

Chapter 9 explains how duties of international cooperation apply to the international community’s collective responsibility to safeguard international peace, security, and human rights. With the establishment of the United Nations, the Grotian paradigm of states deciding when to use force for themselves shifted to a collective stewardship model whereby states must cooperate with one another to avoid armed conflict, punish atrocity crimes, and combat global poverty, including through collective consultation, negotiation, and peaceful dispute resolution.

Chapter 2 explains how international law governing rivers has evolved to establish a requirement that upstream and downstream sovereigns must consult and negotiate in good faith to determine mutually satisfactory solutions for the shared use of rivers.

Chapter 7 examines climate change as a transnational and existential threat to humanity generally, and to certain smaller and vulnerable states most dramatically. Since it poses an existential threat to low-lying coastal states and raises the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, Chapter 7 makes the case that climate change should be understood to trigger duties of international cooperation.

Chapter 8 considers international territorial administration through multilateral governance structures, devoting special attention to Antarctica as a global res communis for peaceful exploration and scientific study.

Chapter 6 shows that international environmental law embraces an equitable approach whereby states must cooperate to suppress transboundary pollution.

Growing environmental instability around the globe has the potential to contribute to the onset of violent conflict. However, there is rarely a clear, direct causal pathway between environmental change and conflict because these interactions are always mediated by institutions – social norms, governance, and policy. How the environment can be a potential trigger for conflict is a critical part of the environment-conflict nexus. This chapter explores the broad literature on the topic, drawing out where there is more and less consensus and what the implications are for understanding the environment in conflict.

Chapter 12 offers a provocative and jurisprudentially ambitious argument: that sovereign equality requires states to submit to international adjudication or arbitration even in ordinary legal disputes that do not involve overlapping sovereign rights or powers.

Chapter 11 uses antitrust law as a case study to explore the phenomenon of extraterritorial regulation. It argues that the principle of sovereign equality requires states to resolve disputes involving fields of concurrent prescriptive jurisdiction through mandatory cooperation.