Historians of violence in the colonial Pacific have had ready access to a colossal body of published works. Any studies on this topic should commence by consulting the immense work by Lévesque, Rodrigue (ed.), History of Micronesia: A Collection of Documentary Sources (Gatineau: Lévesque Publications, 1992–2002). Lévesque’s twenty-volume work mines the documentary history of the earliest colonial era of the Spanish in Micronesia that bears on the interconnected history of the Spanish Philippines. Violence, in many of its forms, is an ever-present feature in this literature though some works have more relevance or popularity than others, such as the accounts by English buccaneer and circumnavigator William Dampier, who authored the classic work A New Voyage Round the World in 1697. Within the extensive historiography of Pacific exploration and encounter, works inspired by the Cook voyages alone are numerous.

The bedrock of the many scholarly treatments of the Cook voyages since the 1950s is the landmark work of J. C. Beaglehole who compiled and annotated the voyage journals of Cook, James and other principals and lower-ranking chroniclers of Cook’s three epic voyages in five volumes: The Journals of Captain James Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). Subsequent historians have worked over these sources, with some having problematised the inherent violence within these accounts more than others. In Spate’s, O. H. K. sweeping three-volume masterwork, The Pacific since Magellan (Canberra: Australian National University Press): vol. i, The Spanish Lake (1979), vol. ii, Monopolists and Freebooters (1983) and vol. iii, Paradise Found and Lost (1988), violence is a consistent feature in the Pacific colonial histories he recounted. Spate’s focus on the era after colonial contact entails details of colonial conquest, piracy, encounters and explorations. Other historians, such as Scarr, Deryk in his The History of the Pacific Islands: Kingdoms of the Reefs (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990) and A History of the Pacific Islands: Passages through Tropical Time (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), likewise feature violence as a driver of Pacific history, especially in the era after colonial contact commences in the form of resource-harvesting industries like whaling, sealing and tortoise-shell collecting, and colonial settlements. Scarr paid more attention to Indigenous histories than Spate and so tracked how colonial forces reshaped power dynamics within Indigenous worlds.

Since the 1990s histories have attempted to tell a story about violence from Indigenous perspectives. For instance, Salmond’s, Anne Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992) attempted to do this from the viewpoint of New Zealand’s Māori. The scholarly tsunami created by the intense debates sparked by Obeyesekere’s, Gananath The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Sahlins, Marshall ’s How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) plumbed not only the circumstances surrounding the killing of Captain Cook in Hawai‘i but also the politics of scholarly position and the limitations of Western scholarly enterprise. For scholars interested in violence in its colonial context, these debates and their ramifications were considerable. For Hawaiian scholar and activist Kay, Haunani Trask in her provocative work From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), colonial violence was redefined, expanded and given renewed contemporary relevance in current debates about Indigenous rights. Trask also homed in on the politics of gender and how central violence towards women was in the forging of Pacific empires. This theme was highlighted in works by Teaiwa, Teresia, notably ‘Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans’, Contemporary Pacific 6.1 (1994), 87–109, and O’Brien’s, Patricia The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), as well as in the works of Margaret Jolly, including her co-edited work with Tcherkézoff, Serge and Tryon, Darrell, Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2009). Recently Igler, David has recognised the prominent place of violence in Pacific colonial history in his ‘Hardly Pacific: Violence and Death in the Great Ocean’, Pacific Historical Review 84.1 (2015), 1–18. More specifically, a special edition of the journal Colonialism and the Colonial History 18.1 (2017), ‘“Rough Justice”: Punitive Expeditions in Oceania’, edited by Chris Ballard and Bronwen Douglas, again signals a growing interest of scholars in violence as a historical frame of Pacific colonial history.

The first stop for any topic relating to violence in China is the excellent ‘Violence in Chinese Culture’ bibliography maintained online by Barend ter Haar, http://faculty.orinst.ox.ac.uk/terhaar/violence.htm. More broadly, see also the chapters in Harrell, Stephan N. and Lipman, Jonathan (eds.), Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

The legal regulation of religion both before and during the nineteenth century is introduced in Jiang, Yonglin, The Mandate of Heaven and the Great Ming Code (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011) and Farmer, Edward, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule, Sinica Leidensia 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). The step-by-step reaction of the mid-Qing to a religious threat is expertly outlined in Kuhn, Philip A, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Much of the content of this chapter is discussed in greater detail in David DuBois, Thomas, Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

The most authoritative short account of the Taiping Rebellion remains Kuhn, Philip A., ‘The Taiping Rebellion’, in Fairbank, John K. (ed.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 264–317. Other influential works include Spence, Jonathan, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). More recently, Platt, Stephen R. has written specifically on the declining years of the rebellion, and its inability to hold on to its early gains: Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Of specific interest is the multivolume collection of expertly compiled and translated documents, Michael, Franz H. and Zhang, Zhongli (eds.), The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966–71).

On the larger outbreak of White Lotus style millenarianism, see Naquin, Susan, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Although this book and her subsequent Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) record events that took place before the mid nineteenth century, both capture perfectly the interplay of beliefs, rumours and ideals that continued to coalesce in religious violence over the century. Sweeping overviews of the period may be found in Yong, Shao, Zhongguo huidaomen [Chinese Sectarians] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1997) and Baoqi, Qin, Qingmo Minchu mimi shehui de tuibian (The Late Qing and Early Republican Decline of Secret Societies) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2001).

Shek, Richard traces the progress of smaller-scale outbreaks of violence in two important articles: ‘The Revolt of the Zaili, Jindan Sects in Rehe (Jehol), 1891’, Modern China 6.2 (1980), 161–96, and ‘Millenarianism without Rebellion: The Huangtiandao in North China’, Modern China 8.3 (1982), 305–36. On the 1891 rebellion, see also McCaffrey, Cecily, ‘From Chaos to a New Order: Rebellion and Ethnic Regulation in Late Qing Inner Mongolia’, Modern China 37.5 (2011), 528–56.

The volume Popular Religion and Shamanism edited by Xisha, Ma and Meng Huiying (Brill Religious Studies in Contemporary China Collection 1, Leiden: Brill, 2011) presents the translated work of a number of important Chinese scholars, including classic articles by Han Bingfang on the Yellow Cliff Teaching, Lu Yao on the origins of the Society of Righteousness and Harmony, and Zhou Yumin on the early relationship between the Society of Righteousness and Harmony and the Way of Penetrating Unity.

On the Muslim rebellions, see Kim, Hodong, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), Atwill, David G, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) and Lipman, Jonathan, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

In English, the two classic accounts of the origins of the Boxer Uprising are Esherick, Joseph, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Cohen, Paul A., History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). A volume edited by Robert Bickers and R. G. Tiedemann expands this field to include both Chinese and foreign perspectives on the progress and suppression of the movement: The Boxers, China, and the World (Lanham; Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

Much has been written on the development of religion in the early twentieth century but, as yet, little on violence by or against religion specifically. On the 1951 campaign against the Way of Penetrating Unity, see David DuBois, Thomas, The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 127–51. On the development of official attitudes towards religion in the People’s Republic, see the essays in Daji, Lü and Xuezeng, Gong (eds.), Marxism and Religion (Brill Religious Studies in Contemporary China Collection 4, Leiden: Brill, 2014). The interpretation of Marxism or Maoism as religion was first raised by Joseph Kitagawa in 1974. For recent analysis, see Apter, David E., ‘Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion’, Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 22.1 (2006), 5–37, and Gamsa, Mark, ‘The Religious Dimension of Politics in Maoist China’, Religion Compass 3.3 (2009), 459–70.

On the resurgence of qigong since the 1980s, see Palmer, David A., Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). On Falungong specifically, see Ownby, David, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008) and Penny, Benjamin, The Religion of Falun Gong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). On the early history of the True Jesus Church, see Melissa Wei-tsing Inouye, ‘Miraculous Modernity: Charismatic Traditions and Trajectories within Chinese Protestant Christianity’, in Kiely, Jan, Goossaert, Vincent and Lagerwey, John (eds.), Modern Chinese Religion, vol. ii, 1850–2015 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 884–919. On the mutated resurgence of one branch as the violent Eastern Lightning, see Dunn, Emily, ‘“Cult”, Church, and the CCP: Introducing Eastern Lightning’, Modern China 35.1 (2009), 96–119.

The historiography of violence in India remains separated into thematic specialisations, with an overview of different forms of state and non-state violence not yet available, and the themes not able to speak to one another. A few exceptions are to be found in as yet unpublished essays or PhD theses, and/or in larger works.

The historiography of the rebellion of 1857–8 has been revised in a multivolume project edited by Bates, Crispin et al., Mutiny at the Margins (New Delhi: Sage, 2013–16). Metcalf, Thomas, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) provides an overview of institutional arrangements for state violence of the British Indian state at its inception.

Saha, Jonathan provides a useful historiographical overview in ‘Histories of Everyday Violence in British India’, History Compass, 9.11 (2011), 844–53. The intimate relationship between law and violence is explained in Bailkin, Jordana, ‘The Boot and Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in History and Society 48.2 (2006), 462–93. A fresh conceptualisation of how state violence constituted an extensive ‘coercive network’ in colonial India is to be found in Sherman, Taylor C., State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010). The close relationship between violence and non-violence, and in particular the reliance of non-violence on the existence of political violence as the basis of its bargaining power, is explored in Maclean, Kama, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and further in Zachariah, Benjamin, Gandhi (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

The rise of communal violence from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century tended to be viewed as the product of colonial policies – symptomatically, see Pandey, Gyanendra, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) – or as a result of more primordial identities, see Kakar, Sudhir, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Regional studies show instigation of violence by the police against Hindus, and/or the move from an overlap of class and community in the structure of a rioting crowd to organised forms of violence: see for instance Das, Suranjan, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal, 1930–1947’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999. The contrast between spontaneity and organisation in riots or pogroms has been a continuing theme in the historiography of independent India.

Studies on the impact of the violence of total war in the subcontinent begin to demonstrate the overlapping of different modalities of violence: see Mukherjee, Janam, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). The longer-term roots of organised violence that manifested itself around Partition can be seen in Franziska Roy, ‘Youth, Volunteer Organisations and National Discipline in India, 1918–1947’, unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick Unversity, 2013. Continuities of colonial measures of state violence can be glimpsed in McDuie-Ra, Duncan, ‘Fifty-Year Disturbance: The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Exceptionalism in a South Asian Periphery’, Contemporary South Asia 17.3 (2009), 255–70.

As scholarly interest in violence surged in the wake of the civil rights era, histories of racial violence figured prominently. Hofstadter, Richard, who edited American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), devoted the longest of the book’s eight parts – as well as individual entries in most of the other sections – to racial violence. In Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Richard Maxwell Brown echoed and extended Hofstadter’s claim that American violence in general, and modern racial violence in particular, had been ‘devoted to preserving the status quo’.

Historians of the Reconstruction era took this premise to heart. See Trelease, Allen W., White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) and Rable, George C., But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) for examples of this renewed emphasis on the ideology and tactics of racial violence. For more recent examples, see Lemann, Nicholas, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006) and Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For the role of violence in the rise of Jim Crow, see Tyson, Timothy and Cecelski, David (eds.), Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Kantrowitz, Steve, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Histories of racial violence outside of the South have also thrived in recent decades, with significant attention to Native American, Chinese and Mexican populations. For a narrative and analytical bridge between Reconstruction and frontier violence, see Sharfstein, Daniel, Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). For an account of violence against Native Americans in the post-Civil War era, see Jacoby, Karl, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin, 2008). On anti-Chinese violence, see Pfaelzer, Jean, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007) and Lew-Williams, Beth, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). For studies of racialised violence and American foreign policy, see Kramer, Paul A., The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Renda, Mary, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Dower, John, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

Studies of racial violence in the Jim Crow era are extensive. For surveys of lynching since Reconstruction, see Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E. M., A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002) and James Pfeifer, Michael, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004). Pfeiffer has also edited collections on lynching outside of the South and mob violence around the world. See also state-level and comparative studies by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William Carrigan, Bruce Baker, Terrence Finnegan and Tameka Bradley Hobbs. For work on racial violence in the south-western borderlands, see Heber Johnson, Benjamin, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and Munoz, Monica Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

For histories of resistance to racial violence, see Dowd, Jacquelyn, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Zangrando, Robert L, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Waldrep, Christopher, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Williams, Kidada E., They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Like Williams, a surge of recent scholarship probes the intersection of racial and sexual violence from Reconstruction to the civil rights era. See Rosen, Hannah, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Feimster, Crystal, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); McGuire, Danielle, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2010).

Scholarship on racial violence and resistance from the civil rights era to the present is extensive, though violence is less prominent as a central theme. For works that focus extensively on racial violence, see Chalmers, David, Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Hill, Lance, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Omowale Umoja, Akinyele, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013). For work on racial extremism in recent decades see Barkun, Michael, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and Belew, Kathleen, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

For religion and violence in South Asia in general, a starting point might be the classic study of riots in South Asia, Tambiah’s, Stanley Leveling Crowds: Ethno-Nationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), which compares Muslim riots in Pakistan, Hindu riots in India and Buddhist riots in Sri Lanka. For the Hindu tradition, a good diversity of perspectives is found in the collection of essays in Das, Veena (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and the chapter on Indian terrorism in Nandy, Ashis, The Savage Freud and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). The violent aspects of Hindu nationalism are explored in Varshney, Ashutosh, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), Banerjee, Sikata, Warriors in Politics: Hindu Nationalism, Violence, and the Shiv Sena in India (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999) and Nussbaum, Martha, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For the Gujarat massacre in particular, see Shani, Ornit, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Studies of violence in Sikhism are mostly related to the Khalistan movement in the 1980s, including the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. The most revealing study, based on insider interviews, is Cynthia Mahmood, Keppley, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). See also interviews with Khalistan supporters in Juergensmeyer, Mark, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4th edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). For the events leading up to the assassination of Indira Gandhi see Sarin, Ritu, The Assassination of Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990), and Tully, Mark and Jacob, Satish, Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle (London: Pan Books, 1985).

Works on Muslim violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan are largely concerned with the rise of the Taliban and other jihadi groups in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The best book on the Afghan Taliban is Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); see also Marsden, Peter, The Taliban: War, Religion, and the New World Order in Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The role of religion in the violent rhetoric of the Pakistan Taliban is explored in Sheikh, Mona Kanwal, Guardians of God: Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Regarding communal violence in the partition of South Asia that created the independent states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, see the biography of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, by Stanley Wolpert, and a contrasting view by Ayesha Jalal, and the more recent analysis of the partition by Pandey, Gyanendra, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

For violence in the Theravada Buddhist countries of Sri Lanka and Myanmar, see the previously mentioned book by Tambiah, Stanley, Leveling Crowds, as well as his Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The Buddhist–Muslim communal violence in Myanmar is covered in Walton, Matthew and Hayward, Susan, Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar (Honolulu: East West Center, 2014). For Buddhist violence in general, including the South Asian cases, see the essays in Jerryson, Michael and Juergensmeyer, Mark (eds.), Buddhist Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

The issue of violence in the Middle East has been mostly analysed within the framework of security or war studies. One could, however, mention Nadine Méouchy and Peter, Sluglett’s The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2004), Mizrahi, J.-D., Genèse de l’État mandataire: service de renseignement et bandes armées en Syrie et au Liban dans les années 1920 (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 2003), Guilain Denoeux’s early book of 1993, Urban Unrest in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Informal Networks in Egypt, Iran and Lebanon (Albany: State University of New York Press), and Quintan Wictorowicz’s edited volume of 2004, Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), with Charles Tilly’s introduction.

Garnham, D. and Tessler, M. (eds.), Democracy, War and Peace in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) also analyses the phenomenon of violence in the broader context of power relations and violence of war. Muhammed, M. Hafez’s critical book Why Muslims Rebel? Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003) constitutes an important survey of the pre- and post-9/11 violence in the Arab world and beyond. Mermier, Franck and Varin, Christophe (eds.), Mémoires de guerre au Liban (1975–1990) (Arles: Sindbad, 2010), Sifry, M. L and Cerf, C., The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Touchstone, 2003) and Khoury, Dina Rizk, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) are well-documented volumes.

The Palestinian issue has been widely dealt with by scholars such as Rogan, E. R. and Shlaïm, A. (eds.), The War in Palestine: Rewriting History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). A few monographs in French on the specific issues of violence in the history of the Arab Middle East include Dupret, B., Le phénomène de la violence politique: perspectives comparatistes et paradigme égyptien (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1994), Haenni, P., L’ordre des caïds: conjurer la dissidence urbaine au Caire (Paris: Karthala, 2005), Bozarslan, Hamit, Une histoire de la violence au Moyen-Orient de la fin de l’Empire ottoman à al-Qaïda (Paris: La Découverte, 2008) and Blanc, Pierre and Chagnollaud, Jean-Paul, Violence et politique au Moyen-Orient (Paris: Sciences-Po, 2014). On Algeria see Martinez, Luis, La guerre civile en Algérie: 1990–1998 (Paris: Karthala, 1998) and Moussaoui, A., De la violence en Algérie: les lois du chaos (Arles: Actes Sud, 2006). And on Turkey, see Gourisse, Benjamin, La violence politique en Turquie: l’état en jeu (1975–1980) (Paris: Karthala, 2014). Although non-scholarly essays, Adel Bari Atwan’s work on al-Qaida, After Ben Laden. Al-Qa’ida: The Next Generation (London: Saqi, 2012), and Patrick Cockburn’s monograph on ISIS, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (London: Verso, 2014), are extremely useful. Worth consulting also are Argo, N., Human Bombs: Rethinking Religion and Terror (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), Bergen, P. L., Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Touchstone, 2002), Davis, J. M., Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Wright, L., The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

One should also mention the importance of International Crisis Group’s reports on Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen (www.crisisgroup.org/).