The year 2021 saw extreme weather events outside the range of what experts had thought possible, signs of a growing acknowledgement among scientists of the need to take risk assessment more seriously, and the launch of a new initiative that might finally tell heads of government what they need to know.

At COP26, countries representing 70 per cent of the global economy agreed to work together to cross the tipping points where clean technologies outcompete the fossils in each greenhouse-gas-emitting sector of the global economy. This could mark the start of a new era for climate change diplomacy. Success will need support from all sides.

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

This chapter presents an institutional theory of miscalculation on the road to war. The central proposition is that leaders face a trade-off between good information and political security. This trade-off is discussed in two parts. The chapter first discusses the informational constraints faced by leaders contemplating beginning an international crisis, explaining why integrated institutions that feature inclusive and open information flows tend to deliver better information to leaders. The chapter then discusses the political logic by which many leaders choose to forgo integrated institutions in favor of institutional alternatives that deliver less complete and less accurate information but provide political protection from bureaucratic punishment.

The concluding chapter briefly summarizes the main findings and discusses the broader implications for the study of international relations. This book has argued that the trade-off between good information and political security helps to explain why leaders often charge headfirst into conflict that they lose. Whereas much of the existing literature posits that bureaucratic participation in a foreign policy decision-making process tends to degrade the information available to leaders as they choose between war and peace, this book has instead argued that institutions and leaders benefit from the information that the bureaucracy provides, especially when leaders pit bureaucracies against one another in competitive dialogue. Yet leaders often forgo these institutions precisely to avoid the costs that a powerful bureaucracy can impose on their prospects for political survival. As such, miscalculation on the road to war is often the byproduct of how leaders resolve the trade-off between a more accurate vision of the world and protection from bureaucratic punishment.

Contrary to the prevailing narratives about China’s economic miracle, this chapter lays out the book’s main arguments that the spectacular economic boom lasting four decades was largely unexpected by both Chinese leaders and the world’s leading economists, that China’s age of abundance originated somewhere, and that a set of historical conditions made it possible. It also discusses the data sources used for this project.

What explains why these groups take on the practice of intersectional advocacy? In Chapter 5, this question is answered from an organizational perspective. Drawing again from the qualitative analysis of interviews with organizational leaders, the chapter presents the features of organizations that practice intersectional advocacy. There are four constitutive features of their organizations that were related to their engagement in intersectional advocacy. Despite a commitment to intersectional feminism, one of these organizations did not have all of these features and it also did not fully participate in intersectional advocacy. By discussing this case, the chapter demonstrates how an analysis of the four organizational features also help identify why groups such as these do not fully take on this practice. It then ends with how organizations with commitments to intersectionally marginalized groups but have not actualized them through intersectional advocacy, can change their varying organizational structures to take on this approach. This chapter is written in a way that scholars and organizational practitioners can both understand and appreciate the practice of intersectional advocacy.

The focus on supply shocks may have obscured the importance of such other factors as institutions, ideas, culture, leaders, and human agency. Certainly these can lead to bad outcomes – bad leaders usually produce bad outcomes – but with rare exceptions they matter only at the margins. Elites will use established institutions to maintain their position against an adverse shock, but those institutions will yield to a big enough shock. Institutions, then, are endogenous, as are leaders (bad ones are overthrown or defeated) and human agency (although crowds, especially acting through markets, are usually wiser than individuals). The salient exceptions are culture and systemic ideas. We have convincing examples of how initially adaptive cultural traits – e.g., of male supremacy or interpersonal distrust – can persist over generations and affect how societies respond to shocks. And systemic ideas about how the world works can prescribe bad or good ways of responding to a crisis such as the Great Depression. Institutions, ideas, culture, leaders, or human agency clearly matter, but supply shocks almost always matter more.

This chapter examines the effects that individual leaders have in shaping foreign policy, including decisions for war. It first presents general international relations debates about whether international structure makes leaders irrelevant, or if instead leaders can make a difference. It then examines regular and irregular processes by which leaders can come to power. Then it describes how differences among leaders might translate into different patterns of foreign policy decisionmaking, including differences regarding beliefs and ideology, background experiences, sex and gender, personal health, and age. It also examines how variance in domestic politics – including the role of political parties, bureaucracy, and the firmness of a leader’s hold on power – can affect how and whether leaders can affect foreign policy choices, The chapter also discusses other concepts and debates, including the diversionary theory of war and whether reputation resides in leaders or in states. It then applies several of these concepts to a quantitative study on whether leaders who are former rebels are more likely to acquire nuclear weapons, and a case study on leaders and the causes of World War I.

At COP26, countries representing 70% of the global economy agreed to work together to cross the tipping points where clean technologies outcompete the fossils in each greenhouse gas emitting sector of the global economy. This could mark the start of a new era for climate change diplomacy. Success will need support from all sides.

The year 2021 saw extreme weather events outside the range of what experts had thought possible, signs of a growing acknowledgment among scientists of the need to take risk assessment more seriously, and the launch of a new initiative that might finally tell heads of government what they need to know.

This chapter defines robustness and fragility, argues that they can only be determined confidently in retrospect, but that assessments made by political actors, whilst subjective, have important political implications. We suggest some of the consideration that may shape these assessment. They include ideology, historical lessons, and the Zeitgeist. We go on to describe the following chapters, providing an outline of the book.

I make two related claims: (1) assessments of stability made by political actors and analysts are largely hit or miss; and (2) that leader responses to fear of fragility or confidence in robustness are unpredictable in their consequences. Leader assessments are often made with respect to historical lessons derived from dramatic past events that appear relevant to the present. These lessons may or may not be based on good history and may or may not be relevant to the case at hand. Leaders and elites who believe their orders to be robust can help make their beliefs self-fulfilling. However, overconfidence can help make these orders fragile. I argue that leader and elite assessments of robustness and fragility are influenced by cognitive biases and also often highly motivated. Leaders and their advisors use information selectively and can confirm tautologically the lessons they apply.

We review our theoretical claims in light of the empirical chapters and their evidence that leader assessments matter, are highly subjective, and very much influenced by ideology and role models. They are also influenced by leader estimates of what needs to be done and their political freedom to act. This is in turn shows variation across leaders. The most common response to fragility is denial, although some leaders convince themselves – usually unrealistically – they can enact far-reaching reforms to address it.