This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of the book. The book explains how foreign intervention influences the course of civil wars. It focuses on how foreign resources affect the military power of the recipient belligerent. The book analyses how changes in the balance of capabilities influence the form of warfare that characterises a civil war. It introduces the idea that foreign resources possess both a gross and interactive value. The book explores how changes in one, or more, belligerent's military power will affect the character of the warfare in civil war. It presents evidence that foreign intervention in the Angolan and Afghan civil wars had a significant impact on the contending strategies of the belligerents in those conflicts. Foreign intervention in the Angolan and Afghan civil wars reinforces the notion that foreign resources will have an inconsistent impact on …

This article explores the contribution made to the consolidation of the Argentine national project, both as a writer and a high-ranking politician, by Vicente Fidel López (1815-1903), a member of the so-called Generation of ‘37. By focusing on some of his less well-known writings, it situates López as a socially inclusive conservative and at the same time as a patrician economic nationalist. Unlike most of the historiography on López, which has focused almost exclusively on his career as a historian, the purpose of the article is to distill the leading ideas of López on political identity out of some of his less well-known works in the fields of linguistics, literature (historical novels), journalism and political essays. It also relates these ideas to his brief performance as national finance minister (1890-1892).

In her response to our article, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni replaces balance-of-power theory (threat of hegemony begets balancing, which produces a tendency of international systems toward equilibria of power) with a complex congeries of competing and contingent conjectures about when states might balance. While these are certainly part of the extensive literature on the balance of power, lumping them together and calling them a 'theory' invites a comedy of errors rather than an empirical test. The 'ado' in our article was a novel empirical test of a theory that has been central to centuries of IR theorizing. As our review of the evidence confirms, this theory can indeed be evaluated in ancient and non-European international systems, and it is wrong: international systems do not tend toward equilibria of power, and balancing is relatively unimportant in explaining the equilibria that do occur. We end up agreeing with the gist of Sangiovanni's response: there is no empirically valid systemic balance-of-power theory, and it is time to turn to contingent middle-range hypotheses about balancing behavior.

The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems that comprise over 2000 years of international politics. Our findings are inconsistent with any theory that predicts a tendency of international systems toward balance. The factors that best account for variation between balance and hegemony within and across international systems lie outside all recent renditions of balance-of-power theory and indeed, international relations scholarship more generally. Our findings suggest a potentially productive way to reframe research on both the European and contemporary international systems.