In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.

This chapter makes four historical interventions. First, It argues that the relief program of the Ottoman central state during the continuum of crisis aimed to maintain agriculture, cities, and the army, but not pastoralists. Although pastoralists lost millions of herd animals, their source of food, financial capital, and sociopolitical power, available historical documents indicate that the Hamidian government did not distribute grain or flocks to pastoralists, and neither did they lend money to rebuild their herds, as they did for peasants. It is unclear whether this was a deliberate policy of the state in order to turn pastoralists into taxable agriculturalists. What is clear is that the traditional Ottoman famine relief policies contributed to mounting ecological and economic disequilibrium between peasants and pastoralists in times of crises and to irreversibly expanding this imbalance in the political ecology of Kurdistan in the post-crises period by triggering displacement, migration, and proletarianization among pastoralist communities.

This final chapter compares the country findings and brings together the conceptual and empirical insights presented. It also aims to answer the questions presented in the introductory chapter: What are the security implications of energy transitions? What elements of positive and negative security can be found? How should energy security and security of supply be redefined in the context of the energy transition? Is there a hidden side to policymaking in the energy–security nexus? It first discusses the interplay between energy, security, and defense policies, followed by securitization and politicization. Subsequently, focus is placed on the security implications of energy transitions, and on negative and positive security. The chapter ends by summarizing the key technological, actor-based, and institutional aspects of the country cases, perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure, and final conclusions.

This chapter explains what has been meant by energy security in different periods and research contexts. It elaborates on the history of energy security research and creates a typology of internal and external dimensions of energy security. Subsequently, the chapter describes the research on the geopolitics of energy, focusing on the geopolitics of renewable energy and the different implications envisaged to unfold from the energy transition. The chapter ends with a brief summary of the EU’s approach to energy security. The chapter, thereby, creates a research context for the empirical analyses conducted in this book.

This chapter introduces the topic of the book, namely the interconnections between zero-carbon energy transitions and security, and why this topic is of importance. It creates a setting for the following chapters by explaining the status of the energy transition in Europe, and introducing the academic fields the book draws from: sustainability transition studies, security studies, and studies of policy coherence and integration. The chapter also describes the research methods used and a brief background to the country cases, followed by a summary of the contents of the book.

To think about the limits (of a text, of a being, of a place) is to think about adulteration. It is to recognise that, at their limits, things merge with other things.

This essay proposes that such thinking has taken on a particular urgency in our own time, an urgency that is at once biopolitical and geopolitical. The spread of a virus has forced us to examine our individual biopolitical limits, as the collapse of a geopolitical ideology – one which allied US capital to progressive democratisation – has forced us to examine the boundaries, between east and west, between north and south, that have shaped the global distribution of wealth and force.

Under these conditions there is a tendency to immerse ourselves in our own person, to withdraw from the porous limits of self, of household, of nation, to some ground zero of being. We look to the imagined grounds of a minimal life that is self-directed and self-sufficient, that is proof against contamination by whatever lies beyond its pale.

We might call this contracted state a condition of mere being – the mere being that remains when our political life, our being in relation to others, is attenuated or forsaken. But this essay suggests that close attention to literary accounts of mere being, from Henry James to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett, helps us to see that poetic mereness is not a denial of shared being, but a particular means of imagining it, a means of approaching that place where we are conjoined with others. In tracing a poetic tradition of mere being, the essay argues that what we find in the dramatically denuded self is not a retreat from limits, but an encounter with them – an encounter which grants us a new way of imagining what Densher calls, in The Wings of the Dove, ‘our being as we are’.

The starting point of this chapter is the observation that would-be dictators are abundant around the globe, but some succeed in setting up and sustaining a rebel army while others do not. As argued in this chapter, a key ingredient for rebel success and conflict longevity is funding. One source of financing is the stolen spoils of nature. Think, for example, of blood diamonds. Beyond this particular example, we also discuss in this chapter systematic evidence on how access to mineral rents triggers an escalation of fighting activities of armed groups. In addition to resource rents, it is foreign funding that results in prolonged conflict, and may lead to proxy wars between fighting factions supported by rival foreign powers. The destructive potential of these sources of funding is examined by drawing on examples and empirical evidence from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and India.

Most US lawsuits involving Chinese companies are initiated by or against their customers, employees, or business counterparts. However, on occasion, Chinese investors may go to court against a US government entity to resolve a dispute. As US–China relations continue to deteriorate, Chinese companies are increasingly caught in the crossfire of the geopolitical rivalry. Being suspected as agents for the Chinese state, China-headquartered multinational companies, especially those with ties to the Chinese government, have expressed growing frustration over what they perceive as unfair treatment by the US government. This chapter examines the legal reactions of Chinese companies to perceived official bias in the United States in the context of intensifying geopolitical tensions.

This chapter focuses on recent developments since the 2009 Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis, including the controversies surrounding the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the consequences for Russian-European energy relations following Russia’s war against Ukraine.

After decades of exponential growth, China has transformed from a stagnant, impoverished autarky to the world’s second-largest economy highly integrated into global supply chains, and numerous Chinese firms have embarked on overseas business expansion on an unprecedented scale. Against that backdrop, many Chinese investors have ventured into the highly competitive, strategically important US market. Though the recent geopolitical confrontation between the two countries has hampered the investment flow, many large Chinese investors have been hesitant to withdraw from the US market. How do Chinese investors negotiate the omnipresent and consequential legal risks and opportunities in the United States? This question, which holds great practical, policy, and theoretical importance, has received scant scholarly attention. This chapter lays out the road map of the book that attempts to provide the answers.

Chapter 2 covers the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Brazilian military government planned and began building its big dams. It argues that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build dams with giant reservoirs and to do so quickly and without regard to their social and environmental footprints. The dictatorship looked to hydropower projects as a means of powering industrial and economic growth that would legitimize military rule, and it wasted no time in starting construction because it takes a long time to build big dams, often the better part of a decade, and sometimes longer. The 1973 oil crisis added urgency, raising the price of imported petroleum and pushing the government to invest in alternative sources of energy. The crisis encouraged the military regime to double down on the big dams already under construction and to plan a host of new ones. Political pressures also made their way into debates about specific dam sites. The most prominent case was the binational Itaipu Dam (on the Brazilian-Paraguayan Border), where the military government had to weigh geopolitical considerations alongside other criteria. The result of all these political pressures combined was a firm commitment to building large reservoirs in environmentally sensitive areas without public debate and without completing thorough environmental impact studies.

The chapter examines how the radical Right’s counter-hegemonic struggle relates to other struggles for power in contemporary world politics and attacks on the so-called liberal international order (LIO). Drawing on recent literature on struggles for recognition, we show how the radical Right has built powerful transversal, global alliances based on a logic and discourse of difference and diversity rather than claims to Western superiority. We illustrate this through an analysis of an emerging global alliance in defence of the ‘natural family’. The radical Right’s civilisationalism and calls for multipolarity also enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The multi-polar, civilisational world order envisioned by the radical Right is not anti-hierarchical and inclusive, but legitimises new differences and new forms of exclusion through its claims to cultural diversity. It is a more sovereigntist vision of the world in which exclusionary illiberal forces would be able to operate with fewer international constraints.

The entwinement of Attica and Boiotia brought with it challenges and opportunities. This geographical entanglement will be analysed to understand how the geological situation influenced neighbourly relations. The entwinement ensured considerations of proximity were always at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds. It also created a distinct relationship between the Athenians and Boiotians. Scholarship previously focused on border disputes as the governing mode of interaction in the borderlands, yet the lived experience was different, as this investigation shows. Analysis of the Mazi and Skourt plains, and the adjacent lands of Plataia and Oropos, demonstrates that these contested lands were not the cause of hostilities, but often a consequence of a pre-existing war; that is, territorial disputes were the result rather than the cause of enmity. Boiotia’s maritime connectivity through its harbours provided another strategic consideration for the Athenians, whose interest in the region was partially predicated on the function of these harbours as strategic hubs in the Corinthian Gulf. Finally, Boiotia’s role as a buffer is investigated and how that influenced neighbourly relations. The security it provided Athens meant that the latter consistently aimed to obtain Boiotia as a shield for its hinterland, whether through force or willingly.