This edited volume explores the nature of authoritarian policing, its transformation and resilience, and its rule of law implications. The discussion of the evolution of policing takes place in the context of the overall development of the police, their professionalization, institutional autonomy and neutrality, legality, and their credibility within the communities they manage and serve. What makes policing “democratic” is a contested concept and the definition varies depending on the level of abstraction and the particular focus of the inquiry. While regime type, which is itself a contested concept, the close nexus between the coercive power of the police and the state, it is never dispositive. Thus, the dichotomous categorization of authoritarian policing (AP) and democratic policing (DP), while useful as a starting point for comparative analysis, misses a large amount of nuance and often overlooks the plurality of either system, neglecting the fact that a police system can be authoritarian or democratic in multiple ways and in different aspects of policing. This volume rejects this simple binary view. It aims to untie and unpack the nexus between the police and the political system and to explore the plurality of both AP and DP.

Traditionally there has been a reflexive assumption that democratic regimes have more accountable and less violent policing practices than those in authoritarian regimes. Yet modern authoritarian regimes have pursued policies of police professionalization while democratic regimes continue to often suffer from comparatively higher levels of police violence. This chapter argues that an examination of policing in Japan, the Philippines, and China supports the growing irrelevance of regime-type for understanding police violence and accountability. While modern policing has been subject to increased empirical study, a technocratic emphasis on policing practices has been unable to overcome both the core sociogenic drivers of crime and the intransigent moralism through which publics evaluate police action. Consequently, historical and cultural factors are the primary drivers of how any given society perceives the legitimate objects of police violence, and thus police violence strongly resists reduction through technical revisions or the reform of formal police institutions.

Political democratization does not necessarily lead to democratic policing; rather, authoritarian legacy always poses a challenge for the integration between democracy and coercive policing. This chapter presents a case study of Taiwan to unveil such authoritarian legacy. After its democratization in the late 1980s, Taiwan has been gradually transformed its authoritarian policing into democratic policing subject to judicial review. However, as Taiwan’s peaceful democratic transition did not come with radical political changes, authoritarian legacy persists and continues to affect policing practices. Nonetheless, throughout both authoritarian and democratic periods, the police in Taiwan have obtained strong legitimacy and been perceived as one of the most trustworthy government agencies. As such, questions to explore in this chapter include: Why has authoritarian policing been this adaptive in Taiwan? How has the coexistence between authoritarian legacy and liberal democracy been made possible? What are the impacts on democratic governance and efficacy of legal reforms?

Using interview data from protesters and frontline police, this chapter examines the transition of protest policing, from soft to hard models, amid the recent unrest in Hong Kong. While police-centric explanations in the protest policing literature view police as intentional decision-makers who can choose from a variety of policing strategies, we employ a mixed-embeddedness framework that reveals a number of factors—external to police—that have deprived the Hong Kong Police Force of its capacity to facilitate peaceful protest through soft strategies of communication and negotiation. These include, (1) a legitimacy crisis of governance in Hong Kong (a macrolevel factor), (2) the erosion of police authority within the local political culture (a mesolevel factor), and (3) stylistic changes in police–protester interactions, involving the increased use of masks and collective action frames of identification as victims of police (microlevel factors). Together, these factors inaugurated reaction spirals that led to the end of soft, facilitative protest-policing in Hong Kong.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Cuba’s shift to a more pragmatic and Soviet-aligned foreign policy in the early 1970s had major implications for its relationship with North Korea. Moreover, it influenced radical changes in North Korea’s own foreign policy. Pyongyang announced the “era of chajusŏng” (independence) and an apparent new faith in what could be achieved through peaceful diplomacy, multilateralism, and non-alignment. Key events influencing these shifts were the de-escalation of the Vietnam War, the defeat of the Latin American insurgencies of the 1960s, Nixon’s troop withdrawal from South Korea, Sino-US rapprochement, and the growing power of the Third World in the United Nations General Assembly. As both North Korea and Cuba adapted to a rapidly changing international environment in the early 1970s, the basis for their special partnership dissolved. Cuba and Vietnam moved closer to the Soviet Union, and North Korea reconciled with China, while repositioning itself as a member of the non-aligned Third World. The possibility that the militant Third Worldism of the Tricontinental Conference might grow and coalesce to constitute a real force in global politics appeared to fade away with the 1960s.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Despite being an authoritarian state, China has adopted a quasi-federalist system to combat climate change. This chapter first introduces the structures and operations of China’s quasi-federalist system. Vertically, there are five hierarchical levels of bureaucracy. Horizontally, there are party committee, government, and environmental and ecological agencies at each level. Power is dynamically distributed vertically and horizontally. This chapter elaborates on the five mechanisms embedded in the quasi-federalist system, namely a target-responsibility system, the inclusion of environmental performance in local officials’ promotion assessment, fiscal incentives, the central inspection system for ecological and environmental protection, and public participation. We then conduct a case analysis of the low-carbon pilot policy in China to explain how each mechanism functions at each stage of the policy process. It shows that China’s quasi-federalist system in climate governance features centralized decision-making, supervision, and evaluation, together with decentralized implementation. China’s environmental quasi-federalism has allowed local governments to experiment with diverse and innovative solutions to climate change, but it has also experienced some challenges as demonstrated in the fragmented patchwork of policies at local levels of government. Overall, China’s environmental quasi-federalism has been effective in climate governance even though it has some drawbacks.

Much of the existing literature has addressed authoritarian learning from external examples but has failed to analyse internal examples. The chapter begins by analysing learning from China, Singapore, and Kazakhstan among the case studies, finding that China is a source of learning. Another example is the restrictive NGO laws that took off after the Russian foreign agents law across the post-Soviet region, which highlights copying at the very least, if not direct learning. The chapter then turns to the domestic, analysing Belarusian learning from the Soviet Union. The main point of interest in the chapter is that the Moldovan and Ukrainian regimes appear to learn from the internal, both in terms of failure and success. This is particularly the case regarding the examples of Plahotniuc and Poroshenko learning from previous regimes both belonged to. The chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of success and failure in authoritarian learning.

This chapter focuses on questions related to human cooperation, focussing in particular on punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation. We take child development processes as a means to investigate this, drawing on fieldwork material from China and Taiwan. As anthropologists would expect, we find that: (a) cooperation is not only a cultural phenomenon but also a historical and political one; (b) reciprocity is a key feature of human cooperation, but the manifestations of this in particular fieldsites are highly variable and sometimes surprising; and (c) cooperation in one domain of life tends to spill over into other domains of life. As noted, however, we go beyond standard anthropological accounts of cooperation by adding a set of questions regarding punishment and child development – questions that, in turn, may help bring the anthropological study of cooperation into closer dialogue with work being done by scholars in other disciplines on this important topic. The goal is to develop comparative questions about ethical life: ones anchored in species-level understandings of what it is to be human and to engage in human cooperation.

We cannot avoid the ambiguities that are inherent in the process of drawing social boundaries. This essay suggests thinking about the nature of those boundaries in three ways, to show how each can reframe our relationships. First, ‘notation’ is an attempt to conquer ambiguity by creating ever more categories and rules. This is the usual way we think about boundaries, but it also contains important limitations. Second, ‘ritual’ includes those acts that are formalized by social convention and repeated regularly. Ritual crosses boundaries of all kinds: between humans and spirits, men and women, food and people. Third, we can bracket away the categories of both notation and ritual by focussing on the full complexity and idiosyncrasy of a given moment, which we will call ‘shared experience’. On a temporary and ad hoc basis, this strategy lets us take practical action, eliding the problem of categories and the ambiguities they produce. These three analytic models are not mutually exclusive. Using ethnographic examples primarily from China, we argue that all three are necessary, but they intermix in different ways, and the nature of that mix contributes significantly to the local nature of pluralism.

The chapter addresses examples of learning from external failure, firstly ascertaining Chinese learning from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It then addresses case learning from three revolutions: the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan in Ukraine and the Arab Spring from across the North African and Middle East region. The three protests led to learning on the part of Belarus and Russia in particular. The Orange Revolution directly contributed to preventive counter-revolutions in Belarus and Russia. The collapse of authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa led to rapid learning from Belarus and Russia. The Euromaidan saw clear learning from Belarus and Russia, but also from Moldova. However, evidence of Moldovan learning is limited, and the chapter highlights that external learning is limited regarding Moldova and Ukraine.

China continued its developmental approach after joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001. However, the policy of Xi Jinping also attempted to achieve self-sufficiency in high-tech products through an active industrial policy. This triggered a protective response from China’s trading partners, including India, the United States and Europe. This is one reason for the trend of the 2000s and 2010s towards isolationist approaches. The second factor is the return of populism, which spread not only to high income regions, such as the Britain, Germany, Hungary and the United States, but also to poorer countries, such as Bolivia. In these countries, nationalists from both the left and right wing of the political spectrum blamed rising domestic inequality on global integration. Amplified by the coronavirus pandemic and rising migration induced by military conflicts, populists promoted international decoupling.

Daniel Defoe was hostile to China, although he never travelled there. Defoe’s writing about China reflects complicated attitudes of Great Britain and Western Europe about increasing contact with China and Asia more broadly.

The institutions of the developmental states set up in the postwar period began to crumble in the 1980s as liberalisation took hold. Isolationist approaches were on the back foot. However, this did not mark the end of economic nationalism. Nation-states were now recast as agents shaping competitiveness and therefore growth. This process is visible in the Baltic states breaking free from the Soviet Union, in Malaysia of the 1990s, and most importantly in reform-era China. Beyond these similarities, the differences are equally enlightening. China’s reforms as conceived by Deng Xiaoping saw an initially cautious, but increasingly rapid, dismantling of Maoist autarky, with the ‘rejuvenation’ of the nation becoming the principal aim. Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad only slowly moved towards a developmental policy, because policy also tried to achieve the economic advancement of ethnic Malays over the country’s ethnic Chinese minority. Finally, not all independent states born from the Soviet dissolution could turn to the West. Ukraine in the early 1990s remained caught between internal divisions and increasingly aggressive Russian policy.