In this chapter, I test the book’s first two hypotheses regarding which leaders contribute to regional security operations and receive support from co-members in return. I expect that leaders with the greatest need for RIOs’ protective benefits – heads of state facing high coup risk – are the most motivated to remain in good standing with co-members who are able to intervene on their side during security crises. In statistical analyses at the RIO-state-year level of analysis, I find that leaders most prone to irregular removal through coups are indeed more likely to deploy security personnel in support of co-members. The chapter also presents tests of the second hypothesis derived from the theory: that leaders who contribute personnel to support RIO co-members increase their odds of receiving protection. Quantitative tests again provide evidence consistent with the theory. The RIO co-members are more likely to deploy troops in support of leaders with prior records of security cooperation in these four RIOs with mutual defense pacts.

This chapter develops the theory of regional cooperation driven by mutual interest in stability and protection for heads of state. It also provides justifications for the theory’s top-down focus on the interests of heads of state within RIOs, which are often considered actors in their own right. The chapter contextualizes the book’s focus on leader survival, and presents the argument regarding why some heads of state turn to RIOs and co-members as part of their multipronged survival strategies. The chapter elaborates on the criteria of “good standing,” and the salience of good standing for RIO members. The chapter also considers alternative explanations and whether they generate similar predictions regarding regional cooperation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of observable implications and testable hypotheses derived from the theory, for which I provide evidence in the remainder of the book.

How and why do African leaders cooperate through regional intergovernmental organizations (RIOs) to manage political and security threats? The central argument of this book is that particularly in regions prone to coups d’état and intrastate conflicts, heads of state concerned with their personal survival often treat RIOs as bases for organizing, in essence, mutual protection clubs. Heads of state adapt RIOs’ competencies in an effort to protect themselves and stabilize like-minded, cooperative leaders in their neighborhood. The mutual aid theory in this book centers on common expectations, reciprocity between leaders, and the positioning of RIOs as the international community’s designated first responders to crises. This chapter provides a summary of the argument, situates the book’s contributions to the field, and concludes with an overview of the remainder of the book.

This chapter concludes the book with a discussion of the implications of the findings for political scientists and policymakers. I consider particularities of decision-making across African RIOs and which results are likely to generalize beyond Africa, as well as open questions that remain for future research.

This chapter focuses on responses to member state crises for one organization, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Whereas the previous chapter identified whether African RIO members behaved as expected on average, in this chapter, I look for evidence of theorized causal mechanisms linking leaders’ prior behavior to co-members’ willingness to provide support. I examine eighteen political and security crises which occurred in members of the Economic Community of West African States between 1990 and 2017. For each crisis, I assess whether the leader in crisis was in good standing with co-members based on prior contributions to regional security operations, or whether they had a record of destabilizing co-members. I then assess whether their standing informed co-members’ responses to the crisis in the manner anticipated by the theory. After establishing the prevalence of pro-government responses to members in good standing and anti-government responses to members not in good standing, I turn to three cases.

Fairness norms operate in virtually every area of social endeavor. There are several common behavioral responses to exchanges between social actors. Exploitation and retaliation, both of which are threats to fairness, are closely associated with narcissism. Other behavioral responses include cooperation, reciprocity, acquiescence, withdrawal, and altruism. Social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are collective responses to profound unfairness.

Chapter 5 proposes that friendship is one of the founding principles of, and one of the main reasons for writing, familial letters. It focuses on the exchange of letters between Keats and his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, suggesting that the exchange itself sustained but also threatened the friendship because of its engagement with a paradoxical logic of reciprocity that governs both friendship and letter-writing. The chapter pays particular attention to the inherent contingency of epistolary friendship – friendship that is supplemented or sustained by epistolary contact – in the case of Keats’s mutually flattering but sometimes difficult relationship with a man who shared the poet’s sense of artistic ambition while lacking his talent and genius. As a form of gift exchange, the interchange of letters between two friends may be said to be governed by the economics of an implicit but difficult and ultimately paradoxical reciprocity.

This chapter examines the historical development of economic thought concerning international trade, tracing its evolution from early barter systems to contemporary theories. It explores mercantilism, classical theories of absolute and comparative advantage by Smith and Ricardo, and neoclassical economics’ focus on consumer preferences. The chapter delves into imperfect competition, introducing concepts like monopolistic power and product differentiation, which led to ‘New Trade Theory’. It also discusses efficiency maximisation, non-discrimination principles like MFN and national treatment, trade in services, and international vertical integration. The chapter concludes by emphasising the significance of reciprocity in trade relations and the role of the WTO in promoting international cooperation and reducing trade barriers.

Thirty years after the European Commission requested Robert Pennington to produce a draft directive, Directive 2004/25/EC on Takeover Bids was published. This chapter examines the Commission’s various proposals during this time and the manner in which both the nature of the Directive and its provisions changed. It analyses the Commission’s 1989 and 1997 proposals and Council’s 2000 Common Position focusing on the provisions that dealt with the General Principles, the supervisory authorities, board neutrality and the mandatory bid. It describes the subsequent conciliation process and the compromises reached in order to arrive in June 2001 at an approved text. Having recounted the dramatic rejection of this proposal by a tied vote in Parliament in July 2001, the chapter examines the role of the High Level Group of Company Law Experts in restarting the process and its introduction of the ‘breakthrough rule’. It then explores the Commission’s 2002 Proposal and the intense negotiations, lobbying and political manoeuvring in 2003 that led to a further compromise text in November 2003. The chapter concludes by noting the unenthusiastic reception from Member States and commentators and the obvious disappointment of the Commission at what it perceived as a watered-down proposal.

This chapter offers a description of the method. Elaborating on the tradition of adda, the chapter explains its significance within post-colonial thought and life in India. It then explains how adda is shaped as a method in the book by drawing on and joining insights from the works of scholars who are located within the disciplines of law and/or the humanities. The chapter provides a detailed description of how diverse scholarly works of post-colonial, feminist and jurisprudential thought are brought together and then enacted as field research for this book.

This chapter discusses both motivations and choice mechanisms that underly how people make strategic choices. It lists multiple areas where our understanding could benefit from closer study. About the early work by Tversky and Kahneman on framing (i.e., the dependence of human choice behavior on different presentations of what to rational agents should be irrelevant factors), it concludes that one must make a choice between normative adequacy and descriptive accuracy. Concerning recent work on reciprocity, it argues that players’ reactions to, for instance, kind acts may lead to volatile behavior in settings with noise, whereas reciprocity toward perceived kind types can be more forgiving and result in more stable reciprocal relations.

A large share of individuals deviates from self-interested behavior in many paradigmatic games, but in many other strategic situations almost all individuals behave in a self-interested manner. Models with heterogeneous social preferences provide a unifying understanding for these seemingly contradictory facts by focusing on the interaction between agents with other-regarding and selfish preferences. This focus explains why and when selfish agents behave as if they were other-regarding, as well as to why and when other-regarding agents behave as if they were selfish. This focus also helps understand (1) the importance of seemingly irrelevant institutional details, (2) the role of contractual incompleteness for the behavioral relevance of social preferences, (3) the role of social preferences for the prevalence of contractual incompleteness, and (4) why social preferences are an important component in explaining key characteristics of the employment relation. More recent evidence suggests that the empirical distribution of social preferences can be parsimoniously characterized by a small number of preference types which also have out-of-sample predictive power for important behaviors such as the demand for politically enforced redistribution.