Chapter 1 asks how the Framers thought about war and security – and how those concerns shaped the Constitution’s approach to military power. It shows that the Constitution does not vest a single, all-purpose “war power” in any one branch. Instead, it divides authority horizontally among Congress, the President, and the courts, and vertically between the national government and the states. These choices reflected anxieties about executive overreach, legislative inertia, standing armies, and the domestic dangers of concentrated military power, alongside a desire to preserve state control over local defense and militias. They also reflected differing views and assumptions about American grand strategy. Drawing on Convention debates, ratification-era writings, and early commentary, the chapter explains how war powers were distributed across multiple functions, including creating and organizing forces, going to war, commanding operations, regulating military conduct, deploying troops domestically, and deciding how wars end. This multidimensional design aimed to prevent any single institution from dominating military power while still enabling effective national defense. In doing so, the Founding settlement established a system of shared control grounded in institutional rivalry, overlapping authority, and political accountability rather than rigid rules.

This book reframes U.S. constitutional war powers by looking beyond the familiar question of which branch may start a conflict. Conventional accounts focus on moments when U.S. forces enter combat – most notably President Truman’s decision to fight in Korea without congressional approval in 1950 – and treat those episodes as the central test of constitutional limits. This book argues that such moments capture only part of how war powers operate in practice. Decisions to go to war are rarely isolated acts; they are shaped by earlier choices about force structure, troop deployments, alliances, and threats, often made jointly by Congress and the Executive. The book opens by pairing Truman’s Korea intervention with a less examined but equally consequential decision: the stationing of large U.S. forces in Western Europe to deter Soviet aggression. That peacetime deployment sparked constitutional debate and helped establish practices that continue to underpin American alliances. From there, the book traces how war powers evolved alongside American strategy from the early republic through the Cold War, the Global War on Terror, and today’s security challenges. Rather than offering a fixed constitutional formula, the book treats war powers as an adaptive system shaped by law, strategy, and institutional practice.

An account of the drafting of the US Constitution focusing on its basic structure, the rejection of monarchy, the place of the presidency and executive power in the constitutional framework, and the debates over whether a pardon power should be confided in the president and, if so, the extent of the pardon power and whether it should be shared with or limited by Congress or the judiciary. The chapter also addresses constitutional constraints on presidential power including impeachment and criminal prosecution.

This chapter explores post-conflict diplomacy in the Iraq War by introducing the idea of “inter-conflict diplomacy,” or how the United States interacted and negotiated with different Iraqi power brokers while building an Iraqi state from the ground up and participating in ongoing military conflict. In contrast to claims that the United States “imposed” democracy there, it argues that US concerns over Iraqi sovereignty, as well as Iraqis’ assertions of their national sovereignty, limited the United States’ ability to reshape Iraqi politics and society. It provides case studies on the making of the Iraqi Constitution from 2003 to 2005 and the negotiations over the continued US role in Iraq after 2008 to illustrate this argument. Finally, it examines how the concept of “intra-conflict diplomacy” might usefully illuminate other US interventions where the boundaries of war, peace, sovereignty, and legitimate authority are disputed and fluid.

This chapter describes how the 2011–14 grand coalition government in Tunisia navigated growing polarization in 2012 and especially 2013. That year, two major political assassinations and dueling protests led to fears of a coup or a descent into civil war. But the political elite’s norms of power-sharing, compromise, and consensus helped to bring them back from the brink and strike a grand bargain that put the transition back on track. Through an inclusive national dialogue mediated by civil society, Tunisia’s Islamist and secularist forces found common ground over a new, progressive constitution that was approved by near unanimity. Meanwhile, the revolutionary and old regime forces likewise compromised to include the old regime in elections but allow a transitional justice mechanism to hold the worst abusers accountable. Power-sharing thus enabled Tunisia’s transition in 2014 to establish a new constitution and electoral law – the rules of the game that would govern its new democracy.

In this chapter, we start by looking at the form of Parliament. We introduce the concept of the separation of powers – legislative power, executive power and judicial power. We then discuss the fact that in Australia we do not follow the classical process of separation of powers. Instead, we have a system called the Westminster system where the executive government and the legislature overlap, because the Cabinet is composed of the most senior members of both arms of government. We then look at the impact of political parties on Parliament.

In the second half of this chapter, we turn our attention to the functions of Parliament. We look first at its legislative function, working our way through the process by which Parliament makes legislation. We then look at the specific processes which Parliament has developed in order to fulfil its responsible government function, by holding the government accountable. Finally, we look at how Parliament functions as a symbol: how it operates as both a national forum and a focus for our community.

All The Seas Were Ink tells its story from the perspective of Abu Bakar of Johor at sea. Johor provides a sweeping view of Asia, from Asia: comparative political thought in practice, and in motion. We observe the evolving international order as it was made sense of, and renegotiated: in ships, ports, court rooms, world exhibitions, marriages. We revisit the history of Islamic constitutionalism, the modern Muslim state, and its entanglements in the international, through encounters, from Johor to Constantinople, Tokyo, Hawaii, London, Chicago. We do this in order to: draw the Malay world into conversation with scholarship on global Islam, its interconnections and exchanges, its expansion and limits; place the making of Islamic law in the entanglements of an evolving international sphere, and the international into its imperial hierarchies; and to approach law’s mobility as a puzzle, rather than an assumption. An early example of a modern Muslim constitution, the Johor Constitution was experimental and many-voiced, elaborating tensions among ideas of rule as dynastic, monarchical, Islamic, and representative. Islamic constitutionalism thus emerges as a global genre of law in motion.

This chapter introduces the idea of tradition and considers its worth outside the law. Head-on studies of tradition, whether in the law or otherwise, are not common. The chapter argues that there are three principal attractions of tradition: (1) as what is tried and true, and therefore reliable; (2) as what is constitutive of our identity; and (3) as what reflects the excellence of our practices over long stretches of time. The remainder of the chapter introduces the plan of the book.

Chapter 4 shows that while one cannot deny Swift’s use of a Tory “conspiracy thesis” in foreign policy tracts like The Conduct of the Allies, Swift relied more heavily on legitimate arguments and sources of international politics and law that have been underrated: Aristotle, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel Pufendorf. Aristotle taught a concept of foreign policy centered on constitutionalism, geography, naval power, self-defense, and public reason. Grotius and Pufendorf provided a foundation of natural and international law, as well as just war theory, that was secular yet grounded on classical learning and Christian ethics. Grotius’s underappreciated influence undermines the idea that Swift’s politics were purely Hobbesian, realist, or authoritarian. Swift had a realist and an idealist strain but “Grotian rationalism” predominated in the controversy over the Utrecht Peace. Grotius also fed Swift’s growing skepticism about the Whig concept of the balance of power.

Chapter 1 revives the traditional view that Sir William Temple had a profound influence on Swift against the recent tendency to underrate Temple. It does so by providing long overdue attention to the most neglected yet most substantial dimension of Temple’s career, literary work, and bequest to Swift: the international dimension. Temple’s teachings as diplomat and foreign policy essayist are primarily responsible for Swift’s heightened awareness of the intersection of domestic and international politics throughout his career. Hence also Swift’s recognition of the interdependence of domestic liberty and international security – the need to preserve liberty through not only constitutional balance but also international balance. This inextricable relationship is often overlooked by scholars focused on the domestic ideological binary of liberty versus authority. It reveals Temple’s and Swift’s shared opposition to domestic political polarization, even at the risk of being falsely accused of favoring absolutist, paternalistic, or arbitrary government.

Swift learned about foreign affairs from one of England’s greatest diplomats, Sir William Temple, friend of William III and champion of balance-of-power foreign policy. But he became chief apologist for the notorious foreign policy maneuver by which Britain abandoned William's Grand Alliance to negotiate a ceasefire with archenemy France. The Whig opposition accused Swift and the Tories of ushering in foreign hegemony and domestic absolutism – and most critics today insist Swift was an authoritarian political thinker and devotee of Thomas Hobbes. Yet Britain and France negotiated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), a milestone of international cooperation, the first major treaty to include “balance of power” in its provisions, and the inspiration of Enlightenment philosophical projects of “perpetual peace,” ultimately including the European Union. This paradox reveals the need to study Swift’s views on international politics in both theory and practice. The key lies in his universalist conception of balance of power.

Chapter 3 reviews Swift’s rapid emergence as England’s chief foreign policy propagandist and analyzes his ethical, religious, political, geopolitical, and economic reasons for opposing the War of Spanish Succession. He became a Tory partisan after two recessions and adopted the ideology of the old propertied elite against the new capitalist elite. He revealed a nativist strain and opposed foreign influences, including national debt and continental military involvement. But he did not abandon basic Whiggish political principles like rule by consent or the right to resist tyranny. He defended emergency executive action not as a pretext for absolute power but as a limited constitutional device for resolving an immediate and objective crisis, notably abroad. Unilateral powers can easily be abused but Swift shows himself concerned about that risk in a way that is not characteristic of authoritarians. His opposition to Dutch national debt went along with opposition to French power politics, revealing middle ground.

Chapter 2 discusses Swift’s statement of political principles, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions (1701), and shows how international relations proved essential both to his fully developed, neoclassical balance-of-power theory as well as his practical political objectives in contemporary debates about the constitution and emerging War of Spanish Succession. Swift wrote against the Tory majority in the House of Commons and thus attacked the tyranny of the majority – but he also took a more realistic and permissive view of popular political participation than has been acknowledged. That view reflected his belief in the voice of the people and consensual government, including when discovering the national interest within the international context. The masses helped to rescue England from French imperialism, just as threats of French hegemony put the domestic political need for power-sharing into perspective. Swift defends executive action for the sake of national security but does not abandon constitutional constraints.

This chapter first presents an ideal type of a hybrid regime. This account sees a hybrid regime as a regime that presents itself as a functioning democracy, but in which the incumbent has disproportionate control over the rules of the game. The chapter then identifies points of tension between a hybrid regime’s constitution and the constitution of a good state. It shows that three constitutional features tend to be found in a hybrid regime: rivaling constitutional ideologies of democracy and guardianship; a trifurcated dual state legal order; and two levels of constitutional battle. Along the way, the chapter suggests how these features might impact a constitutional court in a hybrid regime.

This chapter recasts empire and its constitution and evolution to recover the most expansive of premodern interpolity systems and its charter. It outlines the evolution of the Mongol system, and provides a view of the empire and its dynastic imperium. It re-establishes the framework of the four Chinggisid Uluses as the main interstate system of the pre-modern world. While the Chinggisid törö governed inter-ruler relations, the Chinggisid jasaq formed the most potent laws that ensured the durability, uniformity and consistency of Chinggisid institutions and practices across the imperium. The 1640 Great Code presents an interpolity system, akin to and surpassing Westphalia and its charter, created within the Chinggisid political tradition and törö. Finally, the chapter uncovers one of the most consequential legacies of Chinggisid statecraft that formed the foundation of the modern state system and modern international order – the Chinggisid concept of ejen – the archetype of the concept that Bodin developed as sovereignty.