CATEGORIES OF DEVIANCE are so often bound up with articulations of political power. They work practically to control and manage, but also often draw on political ideologies for their logic. As this section shows, however, political ideologies cannot be disentangled from other normative frameworks: the religious, the moral and ethical, the economic and so on.

This part opens with an article by Michael Hope on treason in the Mongol empire. “Treason” of course fails to translate the precise critical concepts. Hope focuses on the idea of bulqa, which encompasses rebellion, chaos, and disorder. This could be caused by the betrayal of oaths, by breaking laws, or by challenging the social hierarchy: in other words, it was at once an offence against individuals, against a political system, and against social order more generally. The importance of avoiding bulqa was underpinned by a sense of the heavenly mandate—not just an earthly order, but a cosmologically-ordained order was at stake.

The importance of the “great principle” both sustained, and was sustained by, the political ideology of the Mongol empire. Hope explains that order and disorder were articulated in terms of respect for Chinggis Khan's legacy, the great Khan whose actions had unified the peoples of Inner Asia from 1206. He claimed that he needed to impose order because otherwise things fall apart as with “women who have no husbands; as horses who have no pastures.” The normative force of this legacy in defining deviance was threefold: Chinggis's edicts were to be respected, his precedents were apparently sacrosanct, and reverence for his family was to underpin political behaviour. Actions which transgressed any of these three could cause bulqa, and were offences of the most heinous kind. The temporal dimension of this is really important: notions of treasonous deviance were rooted in genealogical respect for this founder of the Mongol dynasty. But, as Hope points out, the temporality of legal authority here was more complex, as most of these rules actually pre-dated Chinggis and originated with the seventh-century precedents of the Törü. This was a normative system, then, which combined the authority of ancient lore with a strong sense of dynastic loyalty.

Indeed, concepts of loyalty and obedience underpinned Mongol notions of treason. Crimes which were punished involved disobedience. Readers might ask whether such stringency arose in part from the requirements of a nomadic empire.