The debate about whether state or non-state players have primacy has been a major preoccupation for International Relations researchers. This chapter argues the key is not so much to determine which players are dominant, but how they interact to produce the prevailing order. The 1985 book Bringing the State Back In declared the return of the state for international politics and political economy (Evans et al. 1985). This chapter argues instead for bringing state–society relations ‘back in’ to the centre of what makes international relations.

After millennia of modest growth, the human population started growing exponentially in the last few centuries. The human habitat has expanded, with population density primarily a function of NPP, distance to coasts and rivers, and altitude. Population growth in Europe underwent the so-called demographic transition as a consequence of changes in fertility and mortality. This was caused by several developments within the broader transformation into Modernity. It was and is repeated at a faster rate in regions outside Europe. One perspective on human behaviour (and reproduction) stems from evolutionary biology, with views on competition--cooperation, selfishness--altruism and niche construction. Complementary views emphasize the role of environmental and sociocultural factors, describing long-term evolution in terms of regimes and syndromes. Growth of the human population has large inertia, but there is still a wide margin of uncertainty in the estimates of quantity and quality of humans by the end of the twenty-first century. Some uncertainty, for instance about abortion, euthanasia and migration, can be understood in terms of divergent worldviews.

This edited volume surveys and retests most of the central explanations for democracy outcomes (levels of electoral democracy and upturns and downturns in it) using Varieties of Democracy data. After a chapter describing historical trends, other chapters survey and test hypotheses concerning geography and demography; international influences; economic determinants; institutions; and social forces. The volume concludes with a new theoretical framework emphasizing the historical sequencing of different kinds of causes. The conclusion also uses path analysis to integrate the most promising hypotheses from the preceding chapters into causal sequences explaining levels, upturns, and downturns.

This conclusion makes two arguments. First, it contends that containment strategies need sound “theories of change,” which are predictions about how the pressures of containment will compel the target state to change its behavior without the need for war. A robust theory of change is crucial for maintaining both strategic coherence and domestic political support for containment strategies. I explore this point with a comparison of Cold War and Iraqi containment strategies in which I show that the former policy had a robust theory of change while the latter did not. Second, the conclusion argues that US foreign policy-makers, politicians, and intellectuals have long interpreted the ultimate cause of other states' behavior as stemming from the nature of their political regimes. This type of thinking, inherent to certain strains of liberalism, has often pushed the United States to pursue total solutions by seeking to fundamentally change other states' regimes, as it did with Iraq.

In Chapter 15, we consider additional outcomes that have attracted scholarly attention and have immense practical importance. We sequentially consider the effects of scale on regimes, social inequality, economic development, and public services, and we find that the causal relationship of scale to these outcomes is unclear. To test these relationships, we conduct original analyses while relying heavily on extant work. This investigation reveals that there is no aggregate relationship between scale and regime type once geographic factors (or more specifically, island status) are accounted for. Our own analysis of the association between scale and social inequality shows no relationship. In similar fashion, there is no cause to believe that size affects economic growth over the long term. When it comes to the provision of public services, the studies that have undertaken to look at this macro-level relationship report inconsistent findings. While we therefore do not find any evidence of a relationship between scale and the outcomes considered in this chapter, this conclusion must be tempered with the caveat that further research on this subject may unearth important patterns.

This chapter traces the emergence and evolution of the concept of ‘regime complex’. Coined by Kal Raustiala and David Victor in their seminal 2004 article, the term calls anyone who aspires to understand the creation, evolution, implementation or effectiveness of a particular institution to take into account its broader institutional environment. A key innovation in the literature on international institutions, it spawned a rich body of work, rapidly becoming a central element of the theoretical repertoire of global governance. The chapter takes stock of this literature, discussing the main insights on causes, evolution and consequences, as well as the research methodologies that have been used to study regime complexes in various issue-areas of international politics. It also discusses avenues for future research, which may contribute to a deeper and theoretically informed understanding of regime complexity and its implications for global governance.

Interplay management involves deliberate efforts by one or more actors to improve the interplay of institutions set up for earth system governance. This chapter synthesizes two decades of conceptual and empirical research on the conditions that influence the conduciveness of interplay management to earth system governance. Those conditions concern the agency and the means of management, notably whether interplay management proceeds by means of coordination or adaptation, as well as the compatibility of the policy objectives pursued. Agents of interplay management are states, intergovernmental organizations and industry- or civil-society groups, seeking to mobilize assets such as material resources, expertise or legitimacy held by one institution to promote objectives pursued under another. Means employed are frequently variants of unilateral adaptation to norms and programmes undertaken in other institutions, rather than explicit coordination involving joint decision-making. Cross-institutional coordination has obvious advantages and is particularly valuable when the institutions govern highly interdependent activities or can bring to bear complementary capacities. With clearly competitive elements present, adaptation has the advantage of triggering less turf-sensitive resistance.

This collection of essays, by leading scholars and practitioners from a range of countries, pays homage to a pre-eminent figure in the field of intellectual property: Sam Ricketson. Inspired by the breadth of Ricketson’s work, the contributions explore issues from a perspective that looks across the field – in particular, across the regimes, jurisdictions, disciplines and professions of IP. Topics explored across the regimes include the nature of IP subject matter, overlaps in protection, historical connections between copyright and patents and the transplantation of civil law moral rights to common law copyright. In across jurisdictions, chapters address, inter alia, the application of private international law to cross-border IP disputes, the Berne Convention and AI-authored works, how countries might exit the Berne Convention and dispute settlement under TRIPS. The intersection of copyright and privacy laws, the relationship between privacy, personality and trade mark laws, the teaching of IP and human rights and the conduct of empirical and historical research in IP are among the matters considered across disciplines. Contributions across professions include the participation of scholars in IP policy making, the IP textbook in legal practice, and the role of expert evidence in IP litigation.