As he developed his own faith, working it out as he lived and wrote, Tolstoy responded to varieties of religious experience and expression, including English ones. From early on, Tolstoy found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and the novels of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others, information about English religious life and examples of how to novelize religious experience. In turn, when Tolstoy emerged, later in life, as a religious seeker and moral authority, English readers responded to Tolstoy both as a novelist and as a thinker.

Responding to imagined threats about chemical weapons delivered aerially, the British government intensified its efforts to create gas masks for everyone, testing fit and designs for those who might be unable to wear standard equipment. It did so in an atmosphere where popular culture continued to offer dire imaginings about poison gas’s potential for widespread destruction and where questions about anti-gas protection in the empire continued to emerge. By the start of 1938, the government’s air raid precautions department had developed extensive plans for how to distribute gas masks in case of an emergency across the United Kingdom. However, as it began to unveil such plans further, it encountered resistance from pacifists and antimilitarists as well as some grudging acceptance. The first significant test of these schemes came amid the Czechoslovakian or Munich Crisis in September 1938. On what became known as “Gas Mask Sunday,” the government asked its civilian inhabitants to line up across the nation to be fitted for gas masks. Although the outbreak of war was avoided, the limitations of anti-gas protection and the lack of suitable gas masks for all would propel this aspect of civil defense to the forefront as Britain’s entry into war seemed more likely than ever.

This chapter evaluates two dimensions that form a metric for evaluating the quality of courts’ decisions: the outcome of the case and the strength of the case determined by the level of dissensus. These two dimensions create four kinds of judicial decisions characterized as those that are either strongly or weakly deferential and those that provide strong or weak checks on the government. The chapter focuses on weak judicial vetoes issued by the two courts, noting their prevalence and connection to contentious political issues experienced in each country.

An enduring criticism of international arbitration and its legitimacy is that parties can appoint ‘their’ arbitrator unilaterally, which is by itself contrary to traditional notions of judicial impartiality. As a result, the striking lack of dissents and their asymmetry when they occur – usually by the losing party appointed arbitrator – raises questions over whether arbitrators act independently and impartially in relation to the party that appointed them. This chapter investigates whether a background in civil law, as opposed to common law where dissent is a more familiar phenomenon, could explain the absence of arbitral dissents. Using PITAD data on both dissents and arbitrator background, the author explores this potential causal factor. The findings, that differences in background seem unrelated to frequency of dissents, lends some support to the view that the relationship between an arbitrator and the appointing party is a main driver of dissenting opinions.

Romanticism and Protestant Dissent are deeply intertwined; this essay reflects on the long history of their cross-connections. In recent decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the inspirational power of Dissenting allegiances to Romantic-era writers, and the rich literary culture of specific religious groups. Individual writers nurtured and encouraged by Dissent are being restored to prominence, and we are beginning to recover the importance of nonconformist discourse in shaping the literature and culture of the long eighteenth-century – such as the influence of Methodist life-writing and different forms of devotional practice. The essay outlines the diversity of nonconformist practice in the period, and argues for the diffuse and far-reaching impact of Protestant Dissent, through the familial and friendship circles of nonconformity, its educational institutions and publishing networks, and its influence on social and political debate. More broadly, it seeks to trace Dissenting affiliations and inspirations in the work of Romantic-era writers, exploring the case study of Anna Letitia Barbauld in detail.

What makes some challengers willing and able to embrace a strategy of civil resistance and others not? This chapter shows how social ties–direct interpersonal connections that link members of a challenger organization to other actors in the society–are central to each of these processes. Two types of relationships, what I term “grassroots ties” and “regime ties,” are especially important. Each has distinct implications for different dynamics of challenger-state contention. I develop a typology of challenger networks based on different combinations of these ties, and make predictions about each type of challenger’s likelihood of initiating a campaign to overthrow the regime using a strategy of civil resistance. An attention to challengers’ social ties holds the potential to explain cases that other theories struggle with, such as variation within regional “waves,” within states, or even within movements over time. It can also improve our understanding of how other theoretical mechanisms work by suggesting why some movements might be more vulnerable to repression or fragmentation than others, or how tactical repertoires can evolve.

In 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist launched an insurgency that lasted 10 years and killed an estimated 16,000 people. But the case of Nepal's Maoists is particularly fascinating for the way in which the conflict ended: with their decision to put down their arms and join with other political parties in a campaign civil resistance. Drawing on original field research, this chapter will make the argument that the Maoist change in strategy was the result of changes in their social ties that came about as a result of territorial gain through war and coalition with other political parties. These changes caused the Maoists to reassess the relative viability of armed and unarmed strategies of rebellion.

This chapter traces the strategic evolution of the Nepali Congress from its deliberation and rejection of nonviolence through a vote of party leaders in Calcutta in 1950 to its gradual return to an exclusively nonviolent platform by 1990. It illustrates that the movement's lack of social ties with other groups within Nepal limited its ability to generate mass mobilization, causing leaders to sour on the prospects of being able to achieve victory through civil resistance. But over the course of the following four decades, the Nepali Congress party was able to substantially enlarge its social base in ways that made it far better positioned for civil resistance. Interestingly, a challenger with a very different ideology, the Marxist-Leninists, underwent a very similar transition. After a failed effort at inciting revolution through the beheading of “class enemies” in the early 1970s, the Marxist-Leninists, like the Nepali Congress, engaged in a program of organization- and coalition-building that paved the way for the adoption of civil resistance.

This chapter sets the social and ecclesiastical scene. It introduces the place of ecclesiastical law in the law of England. It explores the changing place of the Church of England in the life of the nation from the early nineteenth century, the role of the universities in educating future clergy and the significant place of the bishops in political as well as pastoral and spiritual leadership. It describes the need for more churches as the Industrial Revolution took a growing proportion of the population from the country into the towns. It introduces the challenge of the Dissenters with their rival chapels and the complexities of applying ecclesiastical law when there were controversies.

Hamilton Carroll considers shifting trends across nearly two decades of post-9/11 novels from early works grappling with the unrepresentability of terror to recent narratives by Susan Choi, Mohsin Hamid, Joseph O’Neill, and Jess Walter that depict the everyday experiences of racialized precarity in a period of perpetual warfare, nuclear proliferation, migration catastrophes, and neo-ethnonationalisms. Political turmoil and violence by state and non-state entities remain central to twenty-first century life, even as the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted from recent trauma to historical retrospection.

This chapter offers an explanation of Mailer’s notable contributions to the essay and column form, helping readers better understand his diverse roles in American literary culture. It addresses the biographical and cultural contexts that surrounded Mailer’s most notable early breakthroughs as a writer of nonfiction and public intellectual. In particular, this chapter focuses on the context for Mailer’s contributions to the Village Voice and Esquire.

Defining an entity so geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as the Latin west is difficult: despite the spectacular achievements of the Carolingians and Ottonians, fragmentation and plurality prevailed. Smaller political structures proved more durable, and, while the English and French realms gained sharper definition from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, the western empire became a loose federation headed by secular princes, lesser nobles and urban communities – all setting their own codes of conduct. New polities emerged on Christendom’s margins, adopting some Carolingian and Ottonian norms and administrative practices. The church – especially the papacy from the thirteenth century on – set the tone, holding kings and other secular rulers to account, while universities were both agents of clerical control and breeding grounds of dissent. But the range of participants in the political game was expanding, imposing limits on royal power, bringing access to additional resources and offering a potential counterweight to papal power. This was one of the west’s many paradoxes: strong elements of unity alongside the gravitational pull of many different centres.

This chapter reconstructs the specific human rights language, or vernacular, of Polish dissent. Its central thesis is that Polish nonconformist intellectuals understood human rights in a profoundly political way. To support this thesis, this chapter analyzes the two main ideas of Polish human rights discourses: the dissidents’ interpretation of the concept of totalitarianism and the view that humans beings were simultaneously endowed with an inalienable dignity and enmeshed in social relations and cultural norms. On this basis, this chapter shows that Polish dissidents saw the issues that were usually associated with human rights work, e.g. defending one’s private sphere or protecting people from repression, as means to an end: the reclaiming of the public sphere from the totalitarian leviathan. Expressing an unalienable human dignity, human rights were seen as a means of breaking the totalitarian system’s grip on the public sphere by creating pockets of freedom where people could speak their minds freely and communicate with each other to tackle their shared concerns. In the discourse of the dissidents, human rights were understood not as antipolitical alternatives to visions of social change or even to politics as such but as indissoluble linked to questions of collective agency and struggles for social justice.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of dissent in Poland from the late 1960s to the suppression of Solidarity in 1981. It makes three points: It highlights the importance of transnational interactions for the rise of dissent, it demonstrates that Poland's Solidarity movement was indebted to dissident activism, and it shows the political dimension of dissident antipolitics. To do so, the chapter’s first section reconstructs the two cultural milieus out of which Poland's first dissident organizations, the Committee to Defend the Workers and the Movement to Defend Civic and Human Rights, evolved. The section also demonstrates that dissent has to be seen as a transnational movement by showing the impact which the rise of dissent in the Soviet Union had on these two groups as well as by looking at interactions between Polish and Czechoslovak groups. The second section shows how the Solidarity movement clearly evolved out of 1970s dissents even as it went beyond its narrow formula.

This chapter analyzes how political prisoners in 1980s Poland sought to put their plight on the agenda of East–West relations. In so doing, this chapter reconstructs a central symbol of 1980s global human rights culture: the prisoner of conscience. The prisoner of conscience, the chapter shows, was the result of how Amnesty International had reimagined the struggle against political incarceration. In the past, this struggle had been driven by solidarity with political prisoners' specific ideology; Amnesty's activism, in contrast, centered on empathy with the plight of suffering individuals who tried to defend their very humanity against an all-powerful state. By drawing on this discourse and the social practices associated with it, especially hunger strikes, the Polish prisoners managed to turn themselves into icons of human rights culture, quasi-sacred images of the international community's most hallowed values. Yet this process also divorced the prisoners from the specific political aims they were struggling for, allowing powerful international actors to project their own views onto them. For all its antipolitical imagery, the chapter shows, the “prisoner of conscience” was part of a symbolic politics of human rights.

This chapter discusses how the book's main themes relate to the historiography of human rights. It makes four points: First, it argues that the history of the Solidarity movement shows how precarious and contested human rights remained in international politics well into the 1980s, a finding that challenges the view of the 1970s as the final breakthrough of human rights. Second, this chapter argues that the history of Polish dissent and of its supporters in France and the USA reveals discourses in which human rights were not seen as an alternative to politics so much as a means of creating a new kind of politics. Even the overtly antipolitical imagery of groups like Amnesty International merely concealed a profound symbolic politics of human rights. Third, the findings of the book do not suggest that the origins of human rights really lie in the 1980s but that the entire quest for a point of origin is misguided. The history of human rights, rather, is one of their continuous competitions with other universalisms, their repeated reinvention, and adaptation to new causes. Fourth, this chapter argues that the book's findings show that human rights had a crucial impact on the end of the Cold War.