Chapter 4 shows that while one cannot deny Swift’s use of a Tory “conspiracy thesis” in foreign policy tracts like The Conduct of the Allies, Swift relied more heavily on legitimate arguments and sources of international politics and law that have been underrated: Aristotle, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel Pufendorf. Aristotle taught a concept of foreign policy centered on constitutionalism, geography, naval power, self-defense, and public reason. Grotius and Pufendorf provided a foundation of natural and international law, as well as just war theory, that was secular yet grounded on classical learning and Christian ethics. Grotius’s underappreciated influence undermines the idea that Swift’s politics were purely Hobbesian, realist, or authoritarian. Swift had a realist and an idealist strain but “Grotian rationalism” predominated in the controversy over the Utrecht Peace. Grotius also fed Swift’s growing skepticism about the Whig concept of the balance of power.

Chapter 5 examines Swift’s major foreign policy writings, particularly the Conduct of the Allies and the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. It differentiates his neoclassical balance-of-power theory – which pointed toward the need to negotiate peace – from modern, nonnormative, militaristic, and pseudoscientific versions of the theory, which his contemporaries used to justify continuing the war. Swift condemned militarism even when exhibited by his own country. He opposed the attempted subjugation and domination of an enemy country as unwise policy that would lead to international power imbalances and unintended consequences, and thus threaten both domestic constitutionalism and international security. He adopted a mixed qualitative-quantitative method of argument and revealed the conceptual flaws of the quantitative or military-statistical approach adopted by the pro-war Whigs. While his arguments facilitated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French delays in implementing the peace terms left Swift with little more than satire in his last Tory pamphlets.

Chapter 6 shifts the scene to Ireland, where Swift returned after his four years writing propaganda for the Tory government in London. It reasserts the allegorical reading of Part I of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a defense of the Peace of Utrecht, and more importantly the underlying principles. In light of Swift’s international politics and thought, the war between the fictional lands of Lilliput and Blefuscu can be seen as a tripolar model of international relations – not bipolar, as widely believed, since Gulliver acts as arbiter. This model centers on Swift’s neoclassical balance-of-power theory, which also underscores a defensive blue-water foreign policy that contrasts starkly with offensive policy, “reason of state,” imperialism, and colonialism.

Swift learned about foreign affairs from one of England’s greatest diplomats, Sir William Temple, friend of William III and champion of balance-of-power foreign policy. But he became chief apologist for the notorious foreign policy maneuver by which Britain abandoned William's Grand Alliance to negotiate a ceasefire with archenemy France. The Whig opposition accused Swift and the Tories of ushering in foreign hegemony and domestic absolutism – and most critics today insist Swift was an authoritarian political thinker and devotee of Thomas Hobbes. Yet Britain and France negotiated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), a milestone of international cooperation, the first major treaty to include “balance of power” in its provisions, and the inspiration of Enlightenment philosophical projects of “perpetual peace,” ultimately including the European Union. This paradox reveals the need to study Swift’s views on international politics in both theory and practice. The key lies in his universalist conception of balance of power.

Chapter 3 reviews Swift’s rapid emergence as England’s chief foreign policy propagandist and analyzes his ethical, religious, political, geopolitical, and economic reasons for opposing the War of Spanish Succession. He became a Tory partisan after two recessions and adopted the ideology of the old propertied elite against the new capitalist elite. He revealed a nativist strain and opposed foreign influences, including national debt and continental military involvement. But he did not abandon basic Whiggish political principles like rule by consent or the right to resist tyranny. He defended emergency executive action not as a pretext for absolute power but as a limited constitutional device for resolving an immediate and objective crisis, notably abroad. Unilateral powers can easily be abused but Swift shows himself concerned about that risk in a way that is not characteristic of authoritarians. His opposition to Dutch national debt went along with opposition to French power politics, revealing middle ground.

This chapter discusses the development of international law in the post-war era that aimed to liberate global information flow to guarantee world peace. It starts by discussing the achievements and failures of the 1948 Geneva conference on the freedom of information and considers two avenues in which the post-war project of freedom of information continued after the 1948 conference. First, in the drafting of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, freedom of information as a peace project became framed into a fundamental human right, displacing the question about the material and interstate aspects of freedom of information. Second, freedom of information was addressed in forums of international telecommunication and trade dominated by the United States, where freedom of information became equated with the elimination of discriminatory telecommunication rates to enable American global trade. This chapter shows a division of labour and crucial conceptual compatibility between the human rights framing and free trade framing of freedom of information and multiple fault lines surrounding the early intimation of the dual-sided framework.

A principle and practice of sufficiency informs Immanuel Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), which concludes by condemning the rapaciousness of Europeans. Responding to that too-muchness, the philosopher experiments with the thought of what he calls “mere hospitality.” Hospitality is not opposed to inhospitality but a species of inhospitality that welcomes the possibility of being alone, together rather than either alone and apart or together as one. Because human beings cannot forever part ways on the curved surface of the planet, and because they must also live among each other on one and the same planet, if they are to live at all, they are obliged, against their inclinations to fight or flee, to dwell alongside others whom they do not necessarily wish to be nearby. The earth’s surface speaks a bare truth to an enclosed, Europeanized world, a world in which so many are denied a place: It is enough.

While economic interdependence did not render war between the European great powers unthinkable, it placed significant constraints on the use of military force amongst the great powers. In addition, deepening international trade and capital markets produced new instruments for the European great powers to pursue foreign policy, provide security, and advance interests. This chapter examines the vibrant intellectual and political debates about economic interdependence, the rising costs of war, and the maintenance of peace. It then shows how the risk of war created market turmoil, drawing on two case studies: the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and the Bosnian Crisis in 1908. Markets recovered, but after political signals demonstrated great power restraint. Using the work of Kurt Riezler, the chapter shows how contemporaries came to understand economic interdependence not merely as a constraint on military force, but as a particular field of power politics. The chapter concludes by examining, briefly, how different European states considered their foreign policy options in an economically interdependent order and how they negotiated the interdependence dilemma.

Through a new account of three early disputes, Chapter 16 revisits the novel role of the League Council in interstate dispute settlement. This role was delimited by a legal threshold: the question of whether disputes arose out of a matter purely within a state party’s national jurisdiction or domaine réservé. Application of this test, nominally left to the Council, prompted considerable experimentation with institutional forms, and particularly recourse to ‘committees of jurists’, an understudied, flexible, and protean mechanism which would go on to be deployed in many spheres of League activity. Drawing on contemporaneous legal scholarship and a range of archival materials, the chapter sketches the Council’s procedural management of three key disputes, redirecting focus to the larger landscape of institutionalized dispute settlement beyond the Permanent Court of International Justice. In this larger landscape, the chapter teases out the diverse characteristics associated with recourse to avowedly ‘legal’ expertise and reasoning. This close reading of varied ‘legal’ deliberations recovers the multifaceted relationship between institutionalization and legalization of dispute settlement – and suggests the complexity of relations between legal reasoning and peaceful ordering, both for contemporaries and for us.

I turn now to questions concerning killing in war. I first rehearse Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the conditions that must be met for a just war. Aquinas clearly differs from me in his belief that those with public authority are morally entitled to intend death as part of what is required for them to carry out their responsibilities. I argue, however, that even St Thomas is more restrictive with regard to intentional killing than are some contemporary Thomists.

Global environmental change is on the rise and has detrimental effects for most humans. Violent conflict is also increasing. The environment is almost always a victim of conflict, and conflict activities are always shaped by the environment. Understanding the interactions between the environment and conflict is difficult because of their complexity. This chapter reviews the broad literature on the environment and conflict and introduces the analytical framework that forms the core of this book.

Although Thomas Hobbes is often portrayed as an egoistic and atomistic thinker, his political philosophy has a great deal to say about vulnerability and relational equality. This chapter draws out four insights from his political philosophy to apply to contemporary political philosophy. First, he outlines a compelling psychological theory that connects our ontological and social vulnerability. Second, he argues the best strategy for minimising our ontological and social vulnerability is to establish a society of equals, thus asserting a vital connection between vulnerability and relational equality. Third, he identifies some key powers that states must possess to establish and maintain equal relations among people and assuage our vulnerabilities. Fourth, he offers a unique justification for relational equality arguing that it is valuable not so much because it represents an authentic expression of our basic human equality as because it is instrumentally necessary to tamp down our anxieties and promote peace.

War and peace underwent radical changes in early modern Europe. Warfare itself, along with diplomacy and peace-making, changed dramatically during this period, but so too did the discussion of war and peace within the discursive domain of moral and juridical-political thought. Fundamental shifts in the early modern discussion of rights of war and peace occurred because previous assumptions were radically challenged by concrete events and experiences (such as the Reformation or the discoveries and occupation of new continents by Europeans). This in turn led to new ways of moral and political thinking which sought to find answers to these new challenges.

Popular support for war is widely understood to solidify Britain’s sense of itself in the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that objections to war shape Britain’s identity in the closing decades of the century, as the people are called upon to evaluate the justness of the nation’s acts in war. These acts are understood to be public acts, authored by each and every individual, including those who do not directly wage war. The attention to public responsibility coincides with renewed scrutiny of war’s harms, and the moral urgency of recognising and halting war’s killing animates philosophical essays, sermons, and poems, including works by Jeremy Bentham and Anna Letitia Barbauld. The period’s anti-war arguments foreground concepts of injury and responsibility that anticipate later developments in international law and ongoing discussions in moral philosophy.

Drawing together emerging domestic and regional reform struggles with wider geopolitical developments, this chapter explores a new way to think about the unfolding of rights history. Starting in the later nineteenth century, the forces encouraging growing intergovernmental contact and cooperation through multilateral agreements and codified law – technological and industrial changes, including the spread of ever more deadly weapons, the easing of transport and communications, expanding educational opportunities, and a growing reading public – drew likeminded female and male reformers together in spaces beyond borders through new patterns of transnational mobilizations and formal international organizations. Many local advocates pushing against the limitations of the natural rights traditions of liberal citizenship increasingly drew strength in numbers by transcending existing political arrangements and combining national, regional, and international advocacy.