The main themes covered by this collection of sixteen studies by Alexis Heraclides are conflict resolution, ethics in international politics, however elusive, and self-identity and otherness as the greatest barrier to a lack of conflict resolution.

The sixteen studies address the following subjects: ethics in international politics; the normative dimension of self-determination; various salient aspects of separatism, including external involvement and the ending of unending separatist wars; armed intervention in classic international theory (Kant and J.S. Mill); the history of the controversial doctrine of humanitarian intervention, with emphasis on its origins in the Renaissance and on its first phase, the nineteenth century (commencing with the Battle of Navarino in 1827).

The studies also cover six case studies of conflicts: four ethnonational conflicts (Southern Sudan and Sudan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Kosovo-Serbian conflict and the Cyprus problem), three of which have not been resolved, and two inter-state conflicts: the Greek-Turkish dispute regarding the Aegean, the deeper reasons for the ongoing Greek-Turkish antagonism, which are national identity and the respective national narratives, and the naming dispute between Greece and North Macedonia.