The 1948 Berlin Blockade did not escalate to war, largely because Truman and Stalin did not want another world war so soon. Atomic weapons played no obvious role. The fear of atomic weapons did not deter Stalin – who lacked such weapons – from initiating the crisis. They also played no role in ending the crisis, since Truman made no explicit threat to use them. Instead, the airlift defeated the blockade, and Stalin ended the crisis. In contrast, nuclear weapons played a clearer role in the 1958–1962 Berlin Crisis. Both sides now had a second-strike capability, but that deterred neither Khrushchev from initiating the crisis nor Kennedy from considering nuclear war. Nevertheless, the possibility of a nuclear war made each leader more prudent. As the crisis evolved, large numbers of East Germans started crossing into West Berlin. Ulbricht, the leader of East Germany, pleaded with Khrushchev to do something. Khrushchev permitted the construction of a wall (although Kennedy may have signaled his non-opposition). This ended the refugee flow and, therefore, the immediate crisis. The Berlin Crises intensified the Cold War. They led to the formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, as well as the division of Germany into two states.

Italian unification ultimately emerges through four wars. This chapter covers the second of these wars (1859–1860). Austria holds sovereignty over territory in northern Italy. Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont, learns from the first war (1848) that Piedmont cannot defeat Austria – and therefore wrest Italian lands from it – without a powerful ally. He secures an alliance with Napoleon III of France, and at a secret meeting in Plombières, Piedmont and France plot a war. The Italian nationalists argue that the “people” of a nation have a legitimate right to self-rule. The Concert plays no role in this crisis because it does not see the norm of nationalism as a legitimate justification for owning territory. In its view, the norm of dynastic succession (i.e., a king or queen coming to the throne) serves that purpose. The Concert system is therefore biased against the nationalists. The resulting clash of norms increases the probability of war. Nevertheless, territorial issues are generally more war-prone than non-territorial issues, and infusing territorial disagreements with nationalism and identity (or ethnic) claims raises the probability of war further. In the end, the case illustrates well why and how territorial issues lead to war.

Pearl Harbor demonstrates that war can occur when coercion (e.g., economic sanctions) works too well. To investigate this dynamic, we also engage another important, but controversial, question in this case – namely, whether the United States (US) president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) deliberately sought war with Japan as a way to enter the war in Europe. Contrary to some scholars, our analysis concludes that FDR was aware of the total oil embargo that Acheson implemented and that FDR wanted war. Indeed, the US made only one serious attempt to avoid war – the modus vivendi proposal. FDR supported the proposal because he thought it would give the US more time to prepare. Tojo may have entertained the proposal, but he never received it because Chiang Kai-shek and Churchill vetoed it. The latter needed the US to intervene in the war to increase their chances of winning. This is yet another example of alliances promoting war – in this instance, by vetoing a peace proposal. Finally, we consider why Japan was willing to attack the US, even though it knew the US was more powerful.

This chapter investigates moderating factors such as trust-related mechanisms, norms, and institutions, and their ability to explain the relationship between intrinsic motivation and compliance, which is free of regulatory coercion.

The chapter analyzes the crisis and expansion of human rights in the 1970s as a dual phenomenon of the population control movement. It explores the disillusionment among population control activists due to the failure to achieve desired fertility rate reductions despite international efforts. The chapter highlights the shift in perspectives on the human rights framework for population control, with criticisms emerging from various actors including demographers, sociologists, and international organizations. The chapter also discusses the emergence of new actors such as the women’s movement in advocating for human rights in family planning. It argues that UN reports on family planning were shaped by conflicting political imaginaries between UN member states along Cold War and North–South divides. Furthermore, it delves into the debates among international lawyers regarding coercion, national sovereignty, and the role of international law in addressing population growth. It argues that international lawyers saw the legal regulation of population control as a test of the effectivness of international law as such.

Post-genocide Rwanda serves as a case of strong institutional control in which the government engages transitional justice through a strategy of coercion. In this chapter I explore the Rwandan government’s response to international pressure for accountability. To advance government impunity, the government adopts a strategy of coercion, wherein a new transitional justice institution, gacaca, is implemented but subsequently monitored and controlled to advance state impunity and consolidate RPF control. The chapter begins with an overview of armed conflict in Rwanda with particular attention on the complexities of the violence experienced by individuals during the civil war, genocide, and at the hands of the RPF. I then discuss the government’s strategic adaptation of transitional justice to identify and evaluate the coercive strategy in which claims for government accountability are monitored and controlled. I explore the strategy of coercion in practice through an in-depth analysis of gacaca, which has aggressively pursued crimes of genocide while ignoring RPF abuses. To explore the coercion strategy beyond the case of Rwanda, I examine transitional justice in Burundi.

While Chapter 4 outlines the national pattern of visibility projects and the forced exit of private firms from the urban bus sector, this chapter uses comparative case studies, in-depth interviews, and process tracing to explore the causal mechanism linking visibility projects to deprivatization. Guangzhou and Nanning, two capital cities in neighboring provinces in southern China, are selected for a most-similar case comparison. Guangzhou deprivatized its bus sector in 2007, whereas Nanning continues to have a privately controlled bus sector.

Guangzhou initiated multiple visibility projects in its urban bus sector, driven by ambitious city leaders seeking attention from the Party-state. In contrast, Nanning launched only a few projects, as its city leaders sought to avoid attention following recent political turmoil. By contrasting these two cases and demonstrating why deprivatization occurred in Guangzhou but not in Nanning, this chapter illustrates how visibility projects led to the end of marketization in China’s urban bus sector.

Even in the most mundane sectors, firms are still required to provide political services. This chapter examines how the urban bus sector across Chinese cities became a focal point for visibility projects starting in the early 2000s and how this trend led to an uncoordinated, nationwide deprivatization of the urban bus sector by city governments beginning in 2005. These actions contradicted policies that encouraged private provision of bus services.

Using an original dataset on visibility projects and sectoral data from 288 Chinese cities covering the urban bus sector between 1996 and 2016, the chapter demonstrates how successive waves of visibility projects were closely linked to the reversal of marketization in the sector. The chapter opens with an account from a city government official describing their efforts to force private firms out of the urban bus sector, and is enriched with detailed interview notes throughout.

Kant’s criticisms between the Groundwork (1785) and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) do not eradicate perfectionism but transpose it to a new register, the perfection of freedom itself and the conditions of its exercise. Kant’s evocative but incomplete statements of his political position after 1785 elicit numerous debates among Kantians on the basis and limits of state action. Early Kantians view progress as the outcropping of spontaneous freedom, not as administered and imposed. These debates, involving Hufeland, Reinhold, and Humboldt, offer various combinations of Leibnizian and Kantian ideas. In response to Kant’s Groundwork, Hufeland justifies legitimate political constraint through its contribution to systemic perfection. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s early formulation of the limits of state action derives from Kantian anti-paternalism, the Groundwork assertion of the inviolability of rational beings, combined with a modified Leibnizian monadology admitting interaction. His defence of a minimalist state is a possible but not a necessary consequence of Kantian premises. It draws criticism from Karl von Dalberg, who defends Wolffian reformist interventionism.

In the Feyerabend lecture Kant already presents his claim that the principle of right is a principle of coercion, that is, that the state is authorized to use coercion to counteract an unauthorized violation of universal freedom. Such state use of force is a hinderance of a hinderance to freedom. But how is this coercive power specified in particular circumstances? I examine three extreme cases in which a state might be authorized to use its coercive power against its own citizens to cause their deaths: capital punishment, eminent right in emergencies, and war. This paper will show that Kant offered specific explanations of particular limits to legitimate state power, rejecting different limits offered by Beccaria (capital punishment), Achenwall (eminent right and war), and Vattel (war). These assessments reveal that Kant was of several minds regarding whether in any social contract a citizen could rationally consent to these uses of coercion and whether actual or only hypothetical consent was required. I suggest that only later in the published Doctrine of Right did Kant work out his position consistently.

Kant’s 1784 lectures on Achenwall is commonly known as the Feyerabend lectures because the manuscript was attributed to Gottfried Feyerabend. These lectures range over the topics eventually treated in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (1798), which include both right and ethics. From these lectures we learn how Kant thought about the concepts of end in itself, self-sufficient end and human dignity just prior to writing the Groundwork (1785). Kant accepts much of what he finds in Achenwall, but also advances criticisms of the concept of obligation found in Achenwall and also in Baumgarten. He also rejects Achenwall’s attempt to justify coercion of duties of right simply through the distinction, common in the tradition since Pufundorf, between perfect and imperfect duties. The present discussion concludes that in the 1780s Kant’s position on the relation of right to ethics was still unclear. He appears to base right on the ethical value of humanity as end in itself, but also worries that grounding right on an ethical principle cannot explain why duties of right may be coerced.

The distinction between coercion and conversion is not always clear, and it is suggested here that this is because both are types of metonymy and it is not always clear when there is a shift from one word-class to another and when there is not.

Trying to destroy the commandos in the field was one half of Kitchener’s strategy. The other was the destruction of farms and the removal of civilian populations from rural areas to camps close to the British-controlled central railroad. This was designed to deny the commandos access to food and intelligence, but also to act as a threat: continued resistance meant denial of access to family and destruction of virtually everything a burgher owned.

It was not a radical departure from British practice but an evolution and consolidation of what had occurred over the previous 12 months. From the outset of the invasion of the two Republics, the British had considered forms of collective punishment valid for what they saw as illegitimate military actions. This policy had always been chaotically implemented, clashing as it did with a recognition that the conquered populations would have to be governed and so needed to be courted. Perhaps more importantly the shambolic state of British logistics meant during the invasion units lived off the land and rarely fulfilled their obligations to pay for what they took. By the end of 1900, the precedent for large-scale destruction as a tool of war had been well and truly set.

This chapter focuses on the fact that a major difference between a change in an international order and a change of international order is that the scope and depth of the former are not as great as those of the latter—in other words, change unfolding in an international system is somewhat circumscribed. To reflect on a change in the international order and what this means for its legitimacy, this chapter focuses on three points. First, it examines some of the characteristics that facilitate change in an international system and what this implies for the sense of legitimacy. Second, it mentions the reforms that an international order and its legitimacy can adopt to respond to evolving pressures, alluding to the stress faced by the current international system in the last few years. Third, this chapter ends with an overview of the systemic risk to which the present international system is exposed.

If inadvertent escalation is not occurring, it may be because brinkmanship tactics are successfully coercing states into backing down before inadvertent escalation can occur. This chapter assesses this possibility, asking the empirical question, has brinkmanship helped nuclear coercion succeed? To evaluate this question, it examines all cases of successful nuclear coercion, from two separate data sets of nuclear coercion success. It finds that brinkmanship has never helped nuclear coercion succeed: There are no nuclear crises in which one side deliberately engaged in brinkmanship, and the other side backed down because it feared inadvertent escalation to war. To the contrary, nuclear crisis participants routinely act to reduce inadvertent escalation risks. The only partial exception is the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which fears of inadvertent escalation helped push Moscow to move toward a settlement. However, this is only a partial exception, as Washington did not deliberately create risks of inadvertent escalation (i.e., it was not engaging in a policy of brinkmanship), Moscow moved to settle also because of fears of deliberate American escalation, and the crisis outcome is better framed as a compromise rather than American diplomatic victory.