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.

As the three primary cases do not show every configuration of independent variables that should lead to failed concealing, this chapter begins with two more circumscribed explorations of failed concealing in Tanzania and Honduras. It then explores the other strategies and examines their long-term effects. Although concealing is intrinsically risky since a ruler cannot know their own state’s legibility and presence of a strong enough asymmetrically interdependent relationship until these are tested in action, these other strategies may carry even bigger risks. As such, we should expect to see rulers, especially those with reasonable patronage-based capacity but little autonomy from outsiders’ interests and interference in their domestic affairs to try to conceal unsavoury domestic practices. It is therefore important to remain mindful of the effects successful concealing can have on global norms of human rights and good governance.

Many states, almost invariably among those most ignored in international relations theory, exhibit some inconsistent and initially incoherent behaviour on the world stage. In particular, some of them have appeared to invite international scrutiny of domestic practices on which their governments rely to stabilize domestic affairs and to stay in power, but for which they could be punished, often by the very state or organization whose attention they request. The introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument and its implications for international relations theory and practice, especially when these states are miscoded as strong supporters of the norms they in fact violate as part of their domestic stabilization. When powerful actors make concessions in order to acquire a success case within their global missions of rights promotion, democratization or good governance reforms, they may also contribute to a slow erosion of those same norms.

The concluding chapter sums up the existential crisis of the peripheral-patronage state and reasserts its methodological and practical importance, particularly in analyses that presume to derive intention from action and see this as evidence of internalization of, even consent to, norms of human rights and good governance. It then explores the possibility of significant international change, especially from the rise of states whose domestic authority skews more towards patronage than Weberian bureaucracy, and who style themselves as respecters of aid-recipient governments’ sovereignty rather than imposing rights-based conditionalities. China's potentially transformative role receives most attention. Ultimately, because allegedly rising powers may want different rules but are unlikely to advance a rule-free global order, peripheral-patronage states’ need to strategize is unlikely to undergo radical change. This is suggestive of a functionally differentiated hierarchy of states, albeit one whose proper functioning hinges on pretending that hierarchy does not exist.

Georgia under Mikheil Saakashvili provides a two-part illustration in which initial success in concealing its quasi-authoritarian rule from the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation might have been, but ultimately was not, repurposed into success with its most important audiences: the European Union and NATO. Georgia after the Rose Revolution was just illegible enough for the Americans, given their strong asymmetrically interdependent relationship with the new regime, even though Saakashvili’s government had increased legibility by consolidating corruption into his inner circle’s hands. This was not enough for the EU or NATO, even though each has found reasons to overlook domestic insufficiencies before and, according to some members, the Russian threat prior to the August War of 2008 demanded rather than prevented Georgian accession. Georgia had the same mid-level legibility as it showed the Americans, but it faced a deeply divided audience in the other organizations. With no agreement on what Georgia meant for either organization, an asymmetrically interdependent relationship did not coalesce, and Georgia did not manage to conceal its quasi-authoritarian domestic rule from either one.

An overview of existing approaches to less powerful states’ strategies in international relations shows that no theory explains the behaviour described in the introduction. By most logics, they should evade international attention or, if they do approach larger actors with ulterior motives in mind, they should become socialized to valuing the norms they once invoked with cynicism. On no account should they draw the attention of larger actors whose global missions they not only undermine, but depend on undermining for domestic stability. This chapter introduces two scope conditions that begin to explain this conduct. Domestically, these states rule by patronage, a logic of rule that distributes money, jobs, political voice and physical security as privileges rather than by right. Internationally, they are peripheral, which means that they lack material and agenda-setting power in relation to other countries. As such, when patronage rule brings them into conflict with the global rights-based order, they cannot afford to change the offending practices, but neither can they withdraw or bear punishment. A historical account of political development in several post-colonial regions illustrates why peripherality and patronage, while they do not always overlap, correlate highly.

After Sierra Leone’s civil war, President Kabbah oversaw creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission despite his government’s previously strong preference for amnesty, seen as a precondition to rebels’ non-relapse into violence, just before the intervention of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. An unexpected candidate for concealing – one would expect it to recruit, as it normally does – the country successfully concealed a de facto, targeted amnesty for most combatants. Confusion and rumours surrounding the TRC and its relationship to the SCSL limited the amount of truth that would be told, thereby also limiting the information available to the SCSL, leaving it less able to indict. The British, who set the tone for other European donors, had strong incentives to overlook whatever evidence of this amnesty did rise to the surface. If they challenged the Kabbah government on this point, the result could be state collapse and the British might be called upon to intervene in addition to gaining a reputation as a global bully. Because Sierra Leone’s dissembling and its success in doing so both derive from the country’s extreme fragility, the case draws particular attention to the problems of framing its “invitation” of the SCSL as truly consensual.

The Ugandan government was the first to engage with the International Criminal Court and did so via the then-unexpected mechanism of self-referral when it requested an investigation into its conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army in the country’s north. While this seems like evidence of the government accepting global norms of accountability for atrocities in wartime, it entailed significant risk for the Museveni regime. The Uganda People’s Defence Force, essentially fused to the ruling regime, has committed acts within that conflict that may have amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Moreover, these are bound to occur whenever the UPDF is deployed – as it usually is – since its function as a vessel for distribution of patronage makes it a blunt instrument strongly tending towards indiscriminate use of force. Yet Museveni was able to use the country’s centrally managed illegibility to help control the process of ICC scrutiny and gained further leverage through a strong asymmetrically interdependent relationship to the brand new court. This allowed Uganda to emerge better than unscathed, not only with warrants only issued for LRA high command, but with newfound international support for a military solution to the Northern crisis where once he found only criticism due to the rights violations it invariably generated.