This chapter illuminates the impact of the 1948 war on the Palestinian medical community and locates its role in assisting their communities during the Nakba. Within a few months, the British administration withdrew its funding from all governmental health services, most Palestinian Arab doctors were displaced, and casualties mounted. Observing the medical profession during the war, this chapter follows heroic stories of perseverance. Lacking any state structures or national independent institutions, however, these efforts were necessarily localized and short-lived, suffering from a severe lack of supplies. Largely dependent on private practice, the Arab medical profession in Palestine began unionizing only three years before the war and had limited resources of its own. The chapter reviews the resources mobilized to deal with these challenges and the community’s fate following the Nakba.

This chapter explores the possibilities and dilemmas that civil society actors face in resisting and reversing democratic backsliding through examples from around the world. It examines the conditions that shape civil society activism under backsliding and the roles it has played in containing or reversing autocratization. As it shows, in a number of cases civil society resistance has been critical in restraining and reversing backsliding. But it has been better able to counter backsliding when popular support for the backsliding leader has eroded and the opposition is able to work through institutions rather than having to work against them. As backsliding proceeds, institutional channels for influence deteriorate. As a result, there is a critical window during which civil society resistance stands a better chance of containing backsliding: before electoral processes and institutional constraints on executives are fully captured. Once capture occurs, civil society resistance moves to the much more dangerous and difficult task of confronting rather than preventing dictatorship.

A realistic utopia is a utopia that respects basic constraints imposed by the Human Condition. This chapter explains why some kinds of political manipulation are not bad or wrong at all, and would accordingly remain operative in a realistic political utopia. The legitimacy of manipulation is first demonstrated with respect to five categories of the non-deliberative dimensions of political life: mobilizing, participation, negotiation, ruling, and ensuring stability. It is then demonstrated with respect to political deliberation itself. All of this applies to manipulation’s function in the two faces of democratic politics: cooperation and competition. The need for the “social lubrication” functions of manipulation is especially acute in politics, given the intractability of the coordination challenges on a society-wide scale. Specifically, manipulation is, at certain junctions, a necessary tool for overcoming motivational obstacles to the flow of political information in a way conducive to rational persuasion. In such ways manipulation is integral to the very idea of a functioning democracy.

The homeowners’ movements in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen differ by both the scope of their property rights claims and the concomitant ways in which they claim those rights. The leading homeowners in Beijing are political entrepreneurs, devoting themselves more to systemic change and even Chinese democracy than to the self-governance of their individual neighborhoods. The leading homeowners in Shenzhen are social entrepreneurs who navigate through the social, legal, and bureaucratic maze to claim absolute homeownership sovereignty. The defining characteristic of homeowners in Shanghai is respect for laws and rules.

The chapter examines the crisis of the First World War, battlefield action, the war’s impact on patterns of domestic conflict, and the reasons for Germany’s defeat.

The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) is the war among South American states with the second highest casualty rate in the nineteenth century. This chapter provides a detailed case study of this war while offering a long-term narrative of state building in the South Pacific (i.e., Bolivia, Chile, and Peru). The comparison between Chile and Peru is illuminating, since both countries were comparable in important confounders–e.g., their armies, navy, bureaucracies, and budgets–and were impacted similarly by important economic confounders such as economic booms and crises. In this chapter I depict the evolution of war and the balance between central and peripheral elites from independence to the mid-century. Then I illustrate how preparation for war led to state formation, and looks at the details of the campaign, battle by battle. These two sections already serve the purpose of debunking some myths in this literature, like the idea that Peru did not mobilize for the war, and that the war did not lead to extraction in Chile Finally, I discuss how war transformed state institutions, and determined diverging, long-terms trends in state capacity.

This chapter covers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Franco-Mexican War (1861-1867), two of the deadliest wars in nineteenth-century Latin America. A blowing defeat, and a glorious victory, these wars set Mexico in a road to anarchy and state consolidation, respectively. The chapter starts covering early episodes of war in New Spain, like the Mexican victory against the French in the Pastry War (1838-1839), which provided initial impulse for centralizing projects. It then turns to the Texan Revolution and the Mexican-American War, and corroborates the predictions of the theory in the behaviour of all actors and on each phase of the war. Leaving Mexico in the state of total anarchy and state collapse expected after a defeat, I then take a detour to discuss how victory in the Filibuster War (1856-1857) impacted Costa Rica, providing a tentative answer for the mystery of its comparatively high political development until our day. Finally, I return to Mexico and cover the Second French Intervention of Mexico, a blessing in disguise, for the victory against the French ushered the period of more spectacular stability and growth in Mexican history.

Here we first highlight the central role played by the vote and political participation in the democratic process. We then look at who votes and who participates in politics. The chapter underscores severe racial imbalances across most types of participation—both conventional and less conventional. It then seeks to explain these imbalances through a rigorous examination of factors like socioeconomic status, group identity and consciousness, institutions, and mobilization. We also look at the impact of uneven participation on outcomes in American democracy and introduce potential solutions for existing inequities.

This chapter gives an overview of the long history, nature and significance of terrorism for international relations. It first addresses the topic’s recent prominence. Terrorism is by no means the most brutal type of violence, especially compared to wars in which states have killed millions of people. But it garners outsized attention through its symbolic nature. Only by educating ourselves can we rob terrorism of the source of its power. Second, it addresses key academic debates, which usually go back to the definition. The chapter argues that there are core areas of international agreement about what a terrorist act is, and that it can and should be distinguished from other types of violence. It also explains the lively debate over digital technology and the future of terrorism. Third, it lays out intellectual frameworks that help us to understand and analyse terrorism, including types of terrorism, historical patterns and the strategies used by terrorist groups. The chapter concludes with reflections about what is at stake in countering this type of illegitimate act.

In December 1916, in the winter snow of New York State, while Americans busied themselves with Christmas shopping and prepared festivities, a skinny twelve-year-old boy, poorly dressed and in ragged shoes, shouted at the top of his lungs: “Buy a Mirror fer a kid in France!” Every evening after school, James Prendergast Jackson Jr. stood on a street corner and sold copies of the newspaper to earn enough money to sponsor a French child whose father had been killed in the war in France. One of six children in a working-class family, James was determined to assist a child across the ocean who, as he had learned in school, desperately needed food and clothing. Ten cents each day would secure those necessities, and James promised himself he would get those 10 cents selling newspapers. He sold seventy copies of the paper a day, for which he earned 35 cents. From Greenville, New York, James wrote to the secretary of the Junior Committee of the Fatherless Children of France Society (FCFS) – the Franco-American organization matching American “godparents” with French children whose fathers had been killed in the war – and announced his intention of “adopting” a brother in France. With candor and determination, James announced his choice of child to support with his earnings: “I wood like a boy between ten and twelve if it is the same to you.” Attached to the letter was 85 cents that he had been given for his birthday. James was assigned André Leblanc, aged eleven, rue Dautancourt, Paris.

No foreign humanitarian organization garnered more support from Americans during (and after) World War I than did the Fatherless Children of France Society. From New York City, the Franco-American private philanthropic organization rapidly raised a wave of humanitarian response for the children of France’s war dead, doing so through strategic communication and tireless networking. Members of the FCFS toured US cities, states, and territories, opening chapters and addressing assembled crowds, constantly collecting funds. Speakers vividly described the plight of starving babies in devastated France and invited those who had witnessed the trauma of children to testify. Much of the campaigning was done by women representing local committees. Americans were offered a choice on how to spend their humanitarian dollars. From the moment they became sponsors, they could be involved in the process of selecting their orphans. Most importantly, the FCFS reached the wealthy, middle, and working classes alike. In involving school children, laborers, and members of churches, clubs, and associations, the FCFS encouraged a spirit of cooperative – and sometimes competitive – humanitarianism. As a result, the FCFS mobilized large sections of US society to “adopt” some 300,000 French children who were victims of war and kept the aid flowing from 1915 to 1921.

Chapter 7 explores the life on the water for Japanese sailors, and their tenuous connections to the Japanese home islands. Japanese society was mobilized for total warfare, which meant letter-writing campaigns for Japanese school children. Japanese society valorized the Imperial Japanese Navy, the pride of the nation, particularly after such Japanese victories at the Battle of Kolombangara.

The first chapter explores the new presence of the military in the city after the start of the war. It analyzes the militarization of civil society and the blend of increased prestige and tensions in civil–military relations characteristic of wartime. During the mobilization days, reactions in Prague resembled scenes in other European cities: streets buzzing with anxious agitation as crowds thronged army barracks and train stations. Increasingly ubiquitous gray uniforms delineated new visible wartime hierarchies. Contacts between soldiers and civilians sometimes led to violent clashes, especially prevalent around cafés and pubs. These locales were also hubs for spreading information in a context of increased censorship and military repression. General suspicion by the military authorities transformed Prague residents’ experience of the rule of law. The different facets of military mobilization and emergency measures in urban space are examined to contribute to the discussion on the nature of the Habsburg military wartime government.