All aspects of war in China were surrounded by religious activities, ranging from rituals to predict the future and guarantee success in war and the safety of its participants to rituals dealing with the bloody aftermath of war.

This chapter makes the case that Abu Hanifa’s relationship to politics and rulers was a key catalyst for the rise of discourses of heresy against him and, perhaps, the most consequential. Abu Hanifa’s alleged involvement with three rebellions flew in the face of a basic tenet of proto-Sunni traditionalist orthodoxy, namely, political quietism. It shows that politics and the state were implicated in evolving conceptions of orthodoxy and heresy, and how the growth of proto-Sunni traditionalism was in some ways fostered by political elites and representatives of the state.

This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of nihilism in the works explored. An overview is given of the different versions of the problem of nihilism that the thinkers and writers examined here have sketched. This is followed by another comparative overview of their different proposals for solutions to nihilism. A section is also dedicated to showing the many ways in which the thinkers of the nineteenth century anticipated key elements of twentieth-century existentialism. Among the elements discussed are the realization of the nothingness, authenticity, existential freedom, rebellion, the existentialist hero, and the absurd. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the relevance of nihilism in the twenty-first century.

This chapter revisits the classic issue of the origins of Latin American independence and questions a set of prevailing historiographic assumptions. From a review of political conspiracies and mobilizations in eighteenth-century Latin America, it argues that Spanish and Portuguese colonial sovereignty faced significant challenges well before the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807; that the role of popular sectors was crucial to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the eighteenth century; and that the conflicts in Iberian American territory were linked to wider political dynamics in the Atlantic world. Without adopting a determinist argument that Bourbon reform or American identity explains Latin American independence in the nineteenth century, the chapter disputes the idea that a stable and legitimate “old regime” only unraveled after 1808. It also suggests that significant patterns of political contestation in the late colonial period found new expression in the novel context of the early nineteenth century.

Historiography has long relegated women’s roles in Latin American independence to stories of heroines who left home to support the movement only to return once battles were won. This chapter argues, by contrast, that shifting models of femininity and masculinity were central to a political transformation from colonies governed by paternal monarchs to republics that celebrated national fraternity among male citizens. Using intersectional analysis, it traces the multiple ways in which roles for both women and men of various social strata were in flux from the eighteenth century through independence. By the mid-nineteenth century, ideologies of separate spheres became dominant, allowing elite and middling women to extend their maternal influence into educational and charitable endeavors, but only by mobilizing as women. Poor women and women of color could neither live up to domestic ideals nor earn rights, like their male peers, through military service or as household heads. Rather than simply a colonial legacy of patriarchal domination, then, gender norms changed as women went from sharing with men differentiated ranks as colonial subjects to their exclusion from citizenship.

When studying insurgency and civil war, understanding different exit pathways from violence could, ideally, help to prevent the resurgence of that violence. But criminologists have long stated that desistance from violent groups is notoriously difficult to measure: people might disengage from violence but still be committed to their group in other ways, or they might disengage temporarily, only to rejoin the group or commit violence in other ways or with different groups later on. Understanding why people join violent rebellions is not enough to understand the full trajectory of participation in armed activity – especially when a lot of that understanding is built on why men join violent rebellions. It is also critical to understand why both men and women stay, why they leave, and/or why they return after having disarmed. Desertion, perceptions of threat, and armed group fragmentation also cannot be understood at only the organizational level, nor at only the individual level. This chapter discusses how these phenomena are linked together: how these groups frame reality and threats to build cohesion and collective identities, and how their recruits interpret or dispute these frames.

Focusing on the various rounds of debates between the 1620s and 1640s on whether or how to seek peace or truce in the war with the Dutch Republic, this explores how agents and counsellors from different parts of the Spanish monarchy navigated the conflict between ideology and necessity-driven pragmatism in contexts of concrete decision-making. Directed at preserving and re-establishing dominion over the various realms of the monarchy, reason of state was at the heart of this weighing of principle and pragmatism. Agents were at the centre of a constant cycle of collecting and assessing information, projecting likely future courses and searching for the utmost expedience within the boundaries of royal conscience and obligations. What solutions were conceivable when attempts to preserve dominion over the Low Countries ran contrary to the demands of the Catholic faith and the preservation of the rest of the monarchy? Could special circumstances allow for special measures or concessions that might deviate from the princely obligations towards justice and the Faith? The chapter shows that as each decade of the war added to its own history, pragmatic arguments and solutions were often inspired by experience, together with a notion of extenuating necessity.

The Greeks often saw Egypt as a model of long-term cultural stability; in fact, Egyptian history is full of ruptures – periods of instability or external invasions – and a major theme in Egyptian literature is the methods by which such threats to continuity were resisted. This chapter looks at several modes of resistance illustrated by Greco-Egyptian literature of the first millennium. It looks at three topics: first, heroes of the Egyptian resistance to Persia (in Herodotus and the Inaros Cycle); secondly, resistance narratives in the Ptolemaic Period: the story of Nectanebo’s Dream (which probably presented the Ptolemies as re-establishing legitimate kingship in Egypt after the Persians) and the apocalyptic Oracles of the Potter and the Lamb (probably directed at the ‘Typhonian’ Ptolemies). The chapter closes by looking at Manetho’s narrative of Egyptian resistance to the foreign Hyksos rulers, which corresponds to events in the mid-second millennium BCE and the foundation of the New Kingdom. It asks whether Manetho’s narrative should be interpreted as reflecting contemporary concerns with foreign rule and resistance to it.

Chapter 4 returns to the story of Ms. Leanne Woods from the Introduction and provides a clear example of the negative impact of school closure policy, even on those whose schools remain open. In the long term, communities targeted by public school closure lose faith in the political process as durably changing the status quo appears elusive. These negative perceptions have serious consequences because participation provides one of the only mechanisms in a democracy for poor citizens to have power. And yet, the inability of their participation to produce long-term change pushes those affected by the policy to disengage with politics altogether. This chapter conceptualizes this latter phenomenon as indicative of their “collective participatory debt” – a type of mobilization fatigue that transpires when citizens engaged in policy process are met with a lack of democratic transparency and responsiveness despite high levels of repeated participation – and raises serious questions about the utility of participating while poor and Black in American democracy.

Chapter 3 explores Mexican opposition to the aftosa campaign, drawing on hundreds of complaints, local studies, and an original database of over 450 incidents of civil disobedience, riots, and rebellions. Rather than portraying resistance as rooted in the Mexican peasantry or rural tradition, this chapter emphasizes the geographical breadth, cross-class character, and the self-consciously modern public discourse of many opponents, and the vigorous but localized focus of most action.

Contextualising conflict provides further testimony of children’s legitimacy as rulers between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. This chapter turns to narrative accounts of dynastic challenge, opportunistic conflict and kidnap to address the problematic association between child kingship and magnate violence. Evidence for the appearance and escalation of conflict while a boy was king has often been accepted without sufficient critical scrutiny. The chapter shows that attempts to remove children from their royal positions were rare, and that conflict often upheld their legitimacy to rule rather than undermining it. Applying the arbitrary label of violent opportunism to all instances of conflict when a child was king oversimplifies the complex range of reasons for magnate disputes. Instead, conflict could be, among other things, a legitimate response to royal succession, a habitual aspect of the negotiation of disputed property and rights, or a product of recurring quarrels over hierarchy and prominence. The child king’s presence and active participation could, once again, convey a significant and authoritative weight.

In the first empirical chapter, I outline how different subnational governance arrangements, rooted in colonial state building and postcolonial revisions to state structures, shape the patterns of violence in Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi districts. It begins weather discussion of the relationships between state authority and violence, and introduces the key typology of sovereignty-contesting violence (SCV) and sovereignty-neutral violence (SNV). It then surveys the disparate literatures on the various forms of political violence in South Asian countries, suggesting that this typology can provide a way of bridging the divides between these literatures. The chapter then lays out patterns and qualitative examples of these two different forms of violence in the three country. It concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the patchwork state framework in understanding rebellion in South Asia.

In the previous chapter, we saw how colonial administrations attempted to eliminate African roadblock polities and obtain exclusive control over mobility, relying on road building to enhance their grip. To understand contemporary roadblock politics, we need to turn to another set of connections: the negative dialectics between the disintegration of colonial transport networks and new forms of power and survival in its ruins. Chapter 4 shows how the story of Central Africa since independence is largely one of the demise of centralized control over logistical space, and with it, the return of the friction of terrain, to adopt James Scott’s vocabulary. In 1960, Congo entered upon independence as one of Africa’s most industrialized countries. In the wake of the Belgian colonial drive for logistical control, it boasted one of the continent’s most sophisticated transport networks. Yet half a century later, most of this road network was gone. Meanwhile the road network of the Central African Republic shrank by half. Concomitantly, the conditions necessary to manufacture power out of the friction of terrain once again fell into place, and within fifty years of independence, control over roads again became a central pivot in the region’s political economy of war.

As Nicholas approached the third year of his imprisonment, he had had enough. On July 13, 1849, when the slave broker John M. Gilchrest went to retrieve an enslaved woman (possibly Nicholas’s wife) from the workhouse, Nicholas and several slaves kept Gilchrest from taking her. The workhouse officers, with the assistance of city guardsmen, went to subdue Nicholas, who had been left unrestrained in the workhouse yard. When they attempted to restrain Nicholas, several slaves came to his aid. The authorities raised the alarm and some civilians went to the Guard House to retrieve guns meant for slave insurrections. Nicholas led thirty-five slaves out of the workhouse and into the streets of Charleston. Most of them were captured with the first couple of days, but a handful were able to remain at large for eleven days. Nicholas and the two enslaved men who assisted him most were sentenced and executed within a week of the incident, their bodies donated to the medical school for dissection. Many more slaves went before the court and were sentenced to confinement and torture in the workhouse.

In 2011, the Arab Spring led to numerous uprisings against authoritarian leaders across the Middle East. While the reactions of governments varied, Libya sparked the most interest given its notoriety as a pariah state and Colonel Qaddafi’s provocations against the regime’s domestic enemies. This chapter examines how the anti-Qaddafi coalition formed under the guise of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and how the imposition of a no-fly zone to protect civilians slowly transitioned into a mission to destroy pro-Qaddafi forces while defending rebel positions. Momentum shifted as anti-regime forces developed innovative ways of communicating with NATO air forces, which provided more precise targeting. However, the downfall of Qaddafi – aided by air power – was a short-lived victory as the country fragmented along numerous political and tribal lines, with a full-blown civil war reigniting in 2014. To this day, numerous countries are backing different rebels that claim to represent the Libyan government.