The First World War did not mark the end of economic interdependence, but the strategic demands of the war twisted international economic relations even further in the service of power politics. The chapter concludes by returning to the central question of how economic interdependence transformed power politics. It restrained war amongst the great powers and offered new areas for the conduct of power politics. As it reshaped power relations, states that suffered setbacks to their perceived vital interests, became more willing to compensate for their weakness in economic competition by turning to the use of military force.

In recent years, historians have asked whether economic interdependence was slowing or accelerating before the First World War. This chapter analyses international trade and capital flows with a particular focus on Europe. It shows that trade was growing and that growth accelerated following the 1907 financial crisis and downturn. Financial flows also grew, but within Europe, diplomatic considerations had an increasing effect on the direction of capital flows. Contrary to some interpretations, this chapter argues that the Balkans were well-integrated into an increasingly interdependent European economy. Despite concerns about imperial barriers to trade, the share of third parties trade with European colonies increased more rapidly in many cases compared to the imperial metropole. This international economic order required institutions, notably the Gold Standard. These institutions elevated the importance of Britain in the global economy. Patterns of European migration changed significantly in the decades before 1914. Migration was important in key factors of power politics, from population size to financial remittances.

The First World War occupies a central place in debates about effects of economic interdependence on international politics. This chapter examines how historians and IR scholars have explained the outbreak of war in 1914 between states with deep economic ties. It discusses the reciprocal effects of economic interdependence and power politics upon each other. By the early twentieth century, growing international trade and capital flows constituted an essential part of the international order, along with the institutions and practices of power politics. The chapter argues that the interdependence transformed power politics in ways that both sustained peace and created conditions for war. It sets out how that balance tilted towards militarisation from 1911.

The current chapter focuses on basic properties of communication that inform the ways that the study of communication and the study of relationships intersect. These properties include interdependence (the idea that messages simultaneously influence and are influenced by messages that precede and follow them), reflexivity (the notion that communication creates and is constrained by structure), complexity (the concept that communication conveys multiple messages and functions at different levels of analysis), ambiguity (the notion that any given message has various meanings), and indeterminancy (the idea that messages can have multiple and diverse outcomes on relationships). Research on relationship narratives, message features, multiple goals, and message processing, among other topics, is reviewed and challenges for researchers who study communication and relationships are discussed.

Relationship maintenance scholars have long attempted to understand the processes by which partners foster relationship growth. They have done so by focusing on defining and explaining key maintenance strategies that serve to initiate and preserve romantic relationships. In this chapter, we provide a brief history of the relationship maintenance literature. Then we identify the key theoretical contributions to the current understanding of relationship maintenance and discuss recent theoretical developments and known correlates. We conclude the chapter by highlighting the need to diversify and expand the maintenance literature by identifying possible avenues for future inquiry and proposing ways to integrate work across disciplines.

The authors discuss haunting aspects resulting from a request for ethics consultation to support surrogate decision-maker authorization of long-acting reversible contraception in an individual with disabilities. The authors highlight the ethical tension between procreative freedom and equitable access to contraception, particularly noting ableism underlying each side of the argument. Bringing in prior case law, the authors favor a least-restrictive approach to contraception to best preserve the individual’s reproductive rights.

The narrative of the chapter explores haunting aspects of a patient’s inability to participate in capacity assessment due to communication challenges and generalized weakness. Through relying on prior wishes and historical context provided by the surrogate decision-maker, the ethical analysis presented by the authors demonstrates expressed concern with the surrogate decision-maker’s request for long-acting reversible contraception. As the consultation progresses to the patient’s assent to an informal arrangement of supported decision-making, each author shares their professional reflections on issues including equity, diversity and inclusion with a keen focus on ableism in the care of individuals with disabilities. While it may be legally permissible as well as ethically supportable to permit for surrogate decision-maker authorization of long-acting reversible contraception through supported decision-making, the authors grapple with whether the decision honored the patient’s values.

We use recent theories of the politics of economic development and of economic interdependence and war to construct an analytic narrative of the events covered in this volume.  We trace the end of China’s hegemony, and the instability that attended it, to the different policies the region’s states chose toward commerce, development, and reform.  States that pursued modernization gained wealth and power relative to those that did not.  These choices had fateful consequences for the regional balance of power and encouraged modernized upstarts to overthrow the traditional order.  A more dynamic order arose as great powers competed to impose a new hegemony or at least a new stability, forming coalitions with the region’s other states and offering new ideologies to legitimize their rule.  While existing theories shed light on the evolution of East Asian order, our consideration also reveals important gaps in explanation that merit further investigation.

Part II of this book is deliberately called "Lenses and Lessons: Towards more Global Perspectives" as it takes the reader on a journey from Pacific social work across to East Africa and into Europe. It explicity acknowledges the interdependence of the local with the global and that social work is a profession which is shaped by and in turn shapes these geopolitical and socioeconomic contexts. Framed by multiple global crises such as wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, a once-in-a-century pandemic, widespread economic turmoil, a reckoning on race, mass illegal migration, rising inequality, post- and anti-colonial views on social work and much more, the reaffirmation of positive and purposeful and socially relevant social work is illuminated and justified. The issues in Part II can be set against the International Federation of Social Workers definition of social work as “a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that facilitates social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people.” In Part II there are implications for social work education, practices, and policy.

In this chapter, I argue that a comprehensive picture of Platonic autonomy must be balanced by attention to mutual interdependence and the ways that ideas arise through interpersonal dialogue. Philosophical ideas arise in a social context, and to this degree, even ideas that are now ‘my own’ have come to be mine in part through the reasoning of other persons. Moreover, as a result of human fallibility, even the fully developed Platonic philosopher still requires conversational partners to both learn and to test out ideas. Rather than overvaluing self-sufficiency, a philosophical life includes being open to challenges to one’s ideas, tolerating a state of not knowing fully, and learning that one needs others due to the limits of individual reasoners.

Distance is a central concern for global historians. It is a physical and external condition of social life that global processes bridge. Exchanges, encounters and conflicts between strangers are common themes of global historians. Distance is also a cultural and conceptual condition, one that defines relations between strangers far – and near. Mobility and the advent of new modes of transportation and communications had ambiguous effects of closing the gap between strangers while heightening social distances, the need to explain them and policies to redress them.

Peripheral-patronage states have several ways in which they can respond to the bind outlined in Chapter 2. These strategies – recruiting, concealing and insulating – are usually selected according to the state’s possession or lack of domestic capacity and autonomy from outside interference. Some states fail to strategize, finding themselves in the unusual position of being granted autonomy, but lacking the capacity to use the space it provides. Concealing, which involves an invitation of outside scrutiny with the intent to manage the process that follows, is the most interesting strategy because, when successful, it can erode the international norms its users invoke. Successful concealing is possible when the concealing state is both illegible to outsiders and capitalizes on an asymmetrically interdependent relationship with its larger partner in which each has the capacity to harm the other’s reputation. As a result, the concealing state receives the larger actor’s seal of approval for conduct that actually undermines the latter’s chosen norm.