... be wrong, why the objections to secession prove less obvious than they seem, and why it is actually very hard to be so sure that the rule people have now does what people think it does. The chapter then looks at the international order established at the end of the Second World War, which has confined...

...This chapter explains whether and how China is indeed changing international order, which inspires an analytical move to examine the concrete rules of international law. It discusses legal rules that constitute a fundamental part of nearly all conceptions of order. It also highlights how...

... of international order. It also reviews the primary sources of international law rules in custom and treaties, noting the processes by which these rules may formally change and situating them in the context of a specifically maritime order nested within international order. The chapter discusses the historical...

... general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition...

... different histories and cultures that make it less coherent. It mentions the commitment to a liberal international order that had been based on domestic politics in the West and had a very strong political center. The chapter talks about the centripetal tendencies in domestic politics that had begun...

...The liberal democratic order that seemed so stable in North America and Western Europe has become precarious. This book argues that liberalism has never been secure and that since the 1930s the international order has had to be crafted, redeployed, and extended in response to both victories...

...This chapter reviews the great difference between the Cold War era and the present, which is that the relative power of the most powerful states has altered. This fundamental difference means that the quest for a stable international order needs to operate with a more limited set of goals...

... Empire meaning Eurasia Identity Borderlands Near Abroad International order Imperial legacies Bender today is a small city in the Transnistrian Moldavian People’s Republic, an unrecognized statelet that attempted to break away from the newly independent state of Moldova in the chaotic...

... level a shared interest in challenging the political, institutional, and normative leadership of the West. Rather than accept the legitimacy of what successive U.S. administrations have referred to as a “rules-based” international order, China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey all claim what amounts...

...This chapter confronts the core issue of whether the United States is still indispensable, addressing the obstacles to maintaining an open, stable, rules-based international order. It addresses the question of whether the United States is experiencing the kind of fundamental decline that some...

...This book is the first comprehensive study of the law and geopolitics of China's maritime disputes. It provides a rigorous empirical account of whether and how China is changing “the rules” of international order—specifically, the international law of the sea. Conflicts over specific rules lie...

...The inviolability of national borders is an unquestioned pillar of the post-World War II international order. Fixed borders are believed to encourage stability, promote pluralism, and discourage nationalism and intolerance. But do they? What if fixed borders create more problems than they solve...