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This chapter argues that since returning to power at Westminster in 2010, Conservative statecraft has broadly followed Jim Bulpitt’s ‘territorial code’ schema. However, it also suggests this has come under increasing strain, as the political and constitutional consequences of the independence referendum in Scotland and the EU referendum vote have unfolded. The chapter’s primary focus is on the Conservative Party as a state-wide actor between 2010-19. In terms of statecraft and territorial politics, it concentrates on devolution and the centre’s dealings with Scotland and specifically the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party when it was led by Ruth Davidson between 2011 and 2019.

Independence meant the new republic of Cuba had a unique opportunity and responsibility to make public health a matter of the highest state concern. These early debates in the earliest months of the Cuban Republic reveal an ambitious and far-reaching political project to join science and statecraft and secure health as a fundamental right of citizenship. This book explains how ideas about government and personal responsibility for health emerged during the transition from colony to republic, shaped the development of new health institutions and the lives of Havana’s residents, and were contested, transformed, and taken up by ever-broader swaths of the urban population to make claims about citizenship and state responsibility. It examines the post-colonial history of Havana as urban residents confronted disease and early death during a period of dizzying political, economic, and scientific change from 1897-1935. It contends that, over time, the growing interactions between the urban poor and the agents of the expanding public health state were transformative for both. The introduction provides a brief history of medical nationalism in postcolonial Cuba, the changes and medical landscape in Havana, and expanding collective rights in Latin America. It also provides a summary of the structure of the book.

Kevin Stenson discusses Wacquant concept of neo-liberal governance and also the resistances it encounters. Resistance is a key theme which he elaborates from the perspective of a ‘realist governmentality theory’ which yields a more general view of the neoliberal state (by comparison with that of Wacquant) comprising a variety of rationalities of liberal governance of which “governance from below” is a key ingredient. Stenson echoes the contributors who focus on resistance when he argues that the new urban precariat must be seen, not just as the victims of advanced marginality and penalisation but as actors, with racial and ethnic identities, globally mobile whose ‘governance from below is a challenge to contemporary “elite statecraft”.

In 2012, alongside its part-privatisation of the Probation Service, the Ministry of Justice secretly conceived a strategy, hubristically named ‘New World’, to upgrade ‘obsolete’ Radio Frequency (RF) electronic monitoring technology with Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking, and subject unprecedented numbers of offenders to it by 2020. Replacing the existing private sector delivery infrastructure with a hitherto untried model was pursued more openly, but obscured larger ambitions. Over five years ‘New World’ failed spectacularly, and expensively. Subsequent official audits indicted its implementation and actually questioned its conception, but neglected the ideological context and the disruptive political strategy which underpinned it. ‘New World’ was a calculated exercise in ‘disruptive’ neo-liberal statecraft, and the failure of its first iteration does not mean the end of it.

This chapter examines the reasons for the successes of Israel’s oil diplomacy, which can justifiably be termed ‘Statecraft in the Dark’. Given the breadth and depth of the subject, this chapter concentrates on three major achievements of Israel’s secret oil diplomacy, which until the late 1990s remained little known even in Israel. These achievements were keeping the British in between 1949 and 1950, the secret diplomatic entry into Iran in 1950, and the hidden diplomacy that secured the supply of Iranian oil to Israel between 1955 and 1957. It should be noted that petroleum was the only practical source of energy for Israel during the first twenty years of its existence, with its rapidly growing population and ever-expanding and modernising economy.

The chapter offers a comparative study that traces the evolution of fifteenth-century conspiracy literature, illustrating its distinctive features, narrative approaches, and political perspectives. The analysis focuses on the multiform operation of recasting classical models, which matches and, at the same time, underpins the ideological viewpoint in these texts. Specific attention is also paid to the multifunctional role of history in this literature, as it exploits historical narrative, historiographical techniques, and principles, in order to construct a historical memory that conveys a precise political message. This message coincides with the condemnation of the conspiracy as an attack against the state and the ‘prince’, who is now the dominant figure in the political discourse. The key elements that frame this political outlook in the texts are: the function of the author–narrator (as a poet, letter writer, historian, witness); the speeches delivered by historical characters; the stress on the exceptionality of the historical event; the portraits of the conspirators; the representation of the common people; the image of the revenge against the plotters; and the uneasy balance between clemency and vengeance in the ruler’s reaction to the conspiracy. Through the interplay of these components the texts reflect, and contribute to, the development of a theory of statecraft that is informed by a blossoming notion of political realism and plays a crucial role in the definition of a new model of state. Significantly this strand of political thought also emerged in mirrors for princes, which display many elements in common with works on plots.

Diplomacy Unbound explores the emerging practice of digital diplomacy. First, it outlines how we valued the efficacy and power of diplomacy before Twitter and Facebook and mesh networks by tracing the notion of diplomatic power. It then argues that we need to view digital diplomacy initiatives in two categories, those that simply expand the practice of public diplomacy into a new medium, and those that seek to fundamentally engage in the digital space, using the tools and capabilities outlined throughout this book. I argue that when the bounds of diplomacy are extended into influencing not just states, but also digital actors, then they overlap fundamentally with other foreign policy programs and objectives. And this invariably leads to conflicting methods and outcomes. The undue negative costs associated with coercive digital diplomacy demonstrate the weakness of the state in a major realm of its foreign policy. And if the state can’t be effectively diplomatic in the digital space, then what does this tell us about the contemporary relevance of diplomacy itself?