This chapter argues that in the Late Antique notion of “the people,” a normative aspect is present: the people is not just a social designation, but also acquires a constitutional sense if a group of individuals puts itself in a relationship of justice with the emperor (or, for that matter, a bishop). Indeed, the notion of emperor and people are coconstitutive: the one cannot exist without the other. This helps us to understand the political role the people played in Late Antique society, in the absence of institutions such as voting assemblies through which it could express itself. Seen through this lens, riots are occasions when it was questioned if the ruler truly was just. If the relationship could not be mended, the people could favor someone else as ruler. Thus, although there were numerous riots in Late Antiquity, they never questioned the social system but only sought to establish a personal interaction that could ensure justice.

This chapter conveys the origins, course, impact, and consequences of Kristallnacht, locating the events of November 1938 in the longer-term trajectory of Nazi domestic and foreign policy; explores the extent and forms of popular participation in the violence and popular responses to the destruction; pursues the shorter- and longer-term impact of Kristallnacht for the victims (though emigration will be dealt with in Volume III); examines the shifts in Nazi policy in the wake of Kristallnacht, and the shifts of institutional power that accompanied it, and again considers the relationship between antisemitism and foreign policy.

Chapter 5, focusing mainly on Mauritius and British Guiana, examines the ongoing dialogue between indentured workers, magistrates, public commentators, and colonial administrators over the laws governing labor and their underlying principles. By the 1860s and 1870s, the increasing dissonance between Indians’ perceptions of justice and their legal entitlements and magistrates’ hardening line toward labor discipline and public order had prompted more-direct resistance on the part of laborers. State representatives, in response, defended their actions by portraying Indian indentured workers as a largely docile population that benefited from the colonial labor system but was veined through with moral failings and subject to the cynical influence of disruptive individuals. The fissures between the overseer-state and its charges, already apparent even in its early years, were growing into a yawning chasm as a system that billed itself as supportive of “free labor,” Liberal principles, and moral colonial rule increasingly abandoned its paternalist guise to advocate and practice coercion, restriction of labor mobility, and, when deemed necessary, violent suppression of collective action.

In this chapter, we are interested in two questions: (1) What domestic events are most likely to trigger the declaration of a state of emergency? (2) Given that any kind of domestic turmoil is observed and a state of emergency has been declared: what are the consequences for civil and political rights? We find that a general conflict index is highly correlated with the declaration of a state of emergency. The events most likely to trigger a state of emergency are major government crises, riots, and revolutions. With regard to coups – both successful and unsuccessful – we find a significant correlation with states of emergency in autocracies only. We do find that a coup followed by a state of emergency does lead to a (further) reduction in civil liberties.

The 1830s were dominated by the cholera pandemic (1826−37) and epidemics of influenza, typhus, and typhoid (1836−42). These events were so important at the time that the discourse of popular protest became interwoven with the language of contagion and of sanitary reform. The reformist unrest of the 1830s was recast in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) as the 1780 Gordon riots. This chapter explores the extent to which the political and religious unrest in Barnaby Rudge mimics epidemic transmission by placing the novel alongside modern epidemiological studies of urban riots. Further, Dickens connects the 1830s discourses of epidemic and riot with madness, focussing on the problem of the undiagnosability of madness. Barnaby Rudge raises important questions about the transmission of dangerous ideas. Moreover, it connects these to the problem of individual culpability in the case of intellectual disability.

The Murder Act of 1752 imposed post-mortem dissection as the primary punishment for all people convicted of that crime. Recent historians have viewed this statute as strikingly regressive. In fact, its purposes and effects were notably humane. It dramatically reduced the number of dissections imposed on criminal bodies in London. By almost entirely confining dissection to murder alone, it substantially ended riots at executions. And, in ensuring a legal supply of “subjects” to anatomists, it helped make surgery as swift as possible in an age before reliable anaesthesia. On the other hand, public anatomization of dead killers was so uncommon that it seems likely to have inspired fascination rather than deterrent horror. And, in failing to supply enough “subjects,” the Act inspired epidemical levels of grave robbery, finally coming undone when enterprising monsters resorted to murder itself in meeting the needs of anatomists, who now seemed complicit in such crimes.

This introductory chapter describes Chile’s recent and unprecedented wave of protests starting in late 2019 to situate this book within a broader socio-political context and academic debate. The book’s core contribution is the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which adds to the literature on social movements and citizenship studies. It explains how and why communities at the urban margins are able to sustain collective action over several decades and become prepared to support large-scale protests leading to a democratization process. To develop this theoretical argument, this book tells the story of two very similar urban communities founded in eastern Santiago in 1970. They have a similar socio-demographic configuration and location, their histories coincide, and grew as highly politicized and mobilized communities. Remarkably however, while one of the communities followed the pattern of demobilization observed across the country in the wake of its transition to democracy, the other is a counterexample of enduring mobilization. I studied this puzzling contrast through an ethnographic approach that included observations, interviews, and archival research.

This chapter describes the historical backdrop against which mobilizational citizenship developed in Chile’s urban margins from the 1960s onward. It offers parallel accounts of developments across Chile’s urban margins, as well as in the communities used as case studies in this book: the Lo Hermida and Nuevo Amanecer neighborhoods. While descriptive in nature, the chapter makes several key steps. First, it addresses key moments of collective action occurring in underprivileged urban communities before the coup d’état in 1973. Second, the chapter describes the powerfully disruptive impact of the dictatorship in communities at the urban margins. Third, it chronicles the wave of anti-dictatorship protests that occurred in the 1980s. Fourth, the chapter describes the dynamics of mobilization and civil society in poblaciones after the democratic transition in 1990. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of social groups have been demonstrating over social rights in Chile and highly disruptive, large-scale protests erupted in late 2019. The chapter demonstrates the responsiveness of active communities in the urban margins and shows how they provided the organizational structure requisite for protest diffusion.

This chapter provides an understanding of how an Anglo-Atlantic antislavery movement and the prospect of emancipation in the British West Indies unleashed a growing debate on its impact on the United States. This followed from a history of fears of foreign “moral contagion” on the issue of slavery, and similar domestic anxieties — including slave rebellion in Virginia and an emergent abolitionist movement. Highlighting anti-abolitionist riots in New York in 1833 and 1834, it situates these events within trepidations of national and racial boundary crossings that grew out of anxieties over British Emancipation in its Caribbean colonies and its influence on America.

The massacres in Memphis in early May, 1866, and in New Orleans in late July highlight the failure of Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy to provide for black civil rights. The massacres are prompted by black soldiers in Memphis, black suffrage in New Orleans, and black claims to equality on both. Racial violence in the two major cities at either end of the lower Mississippi valley symbolize the failure of Johnson’s policy and help bring about Radical Reconstruction. Having been integral to the military outcome of the war and the ending of slavery, the lower Mississippi valley will continue to play an essential role in national affairs – especially with regard to race – throughout Reconstruction and for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

This chapter argues that the emergence of Krautrock can only be understood against the background of the specific mixture of national and international impulses that shaped the West German musical scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What is striking is a high degree of politicisation that resulted, among other things, from the Nazi past and the position of the divided country at the interface of the Cold War. It fuelled a particularly radical student movement and at the same time legitimised a fundamental critique of the culture industry. Combined with the musical impulses from United States and Britain, this gave rise to very unique musical forms that seemed to counter the international mainstream with something entirely new.

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.

The rioting and looting after Henry Hunt’s great reform meeting on Spa Fields on 3 December 1816 marked a turning point in Thistlewood’s career. Its failure led to his attempt to flee to America, to his capture, and in June 1817 to the aborted treason trial of Watson, Preston, Thistlewood, and Hooper. This collapsed once it was shown to be based on the evidence of the spy John Castle.Henceforth Thistlewood was a marked man on the extremist edges of London radicalism.

The Great Migration ended in 1970 as manufacturing was replaced with electronic goods. Wages stagnated, and income inequality increased rapidly. This led to a new Gilded Age. Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs. Blacks were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War, and he penalized them by incarcerating them. This, helped by state laws and President Reagan, led to mass incarceration – which became known as the New Jim Crow. Public education was reserved for suburban whites, while urban Blacks were in prison or attended underfunded schools. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis demonstrates the difficulty of urban Blacks as jobs and urban facilities disappeared. President Obama was the first Black president, elected in the financial crisis of 2008. The Supreme Court nullified the 1965 Voting Act as it had done with amendments in the 1880s. Obamacare was the most enduring achievements of Obama’s presidency.

This chapter discusses the specific relationships between Golkar’s entrenchment, the exclusion of local ethnic elites, and the mobilization of riots in two high-conflict Indonesian provinces, Central Sulawesi and Maluku. By comparing two pairs of districts – Ambon and Maluku Tenggara in Maluku province, and Banggai and Poso in Central Sulawesi province – I demonstrate the importance of local elites’ framing, mobilization, and organization of violence. Although the four districts are relatively similar in their religious and ethnic composition, level of economic development, and dependence on the state, Ambon and Poso experienced some of the most protracted and intense ethnocommunal violence in Indonesia’s recent history, while their two neighboring districts, Maluku Tenggara and Banggai, respectively, were relatively peaceful by comparison. Relying on interviews with bureaucrats, community leaders, and former combatants, I show that these diverging outcomes can be attributed to local elites’ initial political configuration at the onset of the democratic transition, and to their actions and responses to trigger events.

In this chapter, I summarize my findings and discuss their implications and contributions to existing literatures. I discuss how the theory offered in this book travels to cases beyond Indonesia, such as Kenya and Kyrgyzstan. I identify remaining unanswered questions and outline possible trajectories of future research on political exclusion, institutional accommodation of excluded actors, and demobilization of participants in violence in countries in political transition.

This chapter discusses the specific relationships between Golkar’s entrenchment, the exclusion of local ethnic elites, and the mobilization of riots in two high-conflict Indonesian provinces, Central Sulawesi and Maluku. By comparing two pairs of districts – Ambon and Maluku Tenggara in Maluku province, and Banggai and Poso in Central Sulawesi province – I demonstrate the importance of local elites’ framing, mobilization, and organization of violence. Although the four districts are relatively similar in their religious and ethnic composition, level of economic development, and dependence on the state, Ambon and Poso experienced some of the most protracted and intense ethnocommunal violence in Indonesia’s recent history, while their two neighboring districts, Maluku Tenggara and Banggai, respectively, were relatively peaceful by comparison. Relying on interviews with bureaucrats, community leaders, and former combatants, I show that these diverging outcomes can be attributed to local elites’ initial political configuration at the onset of the democratic transition, and to their actions and responses to trigger events.