By the beginning of the twentieth century, China’s weakness provoked crisis, and new Western-inspired ideas of nationalism were taking root in East Asia. A Nationalist Revolution in 1911–1912 replaced the Qing Empire with a new Republic of China, and rejection of Chinese tradition was promoted by the “New Youth” of the May Fourth Movement. After the first president of the republic died, China dissolved into warlordism. Under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Party struggled to reunify China. In 1905 the Japanese defeated Russia in war and acquired Russian facilities in Manchuria. Korea became a Japanese colony, which the Japanese attempted to assimilate. But Japanese rule in Korea was harsh and discriminatory, and a spirit of Korean nationalism was brewing. In the Japanese home islands, universal adult male suffrage was implemented in 1925, and Japan had become a multi-party democracy. In French colonial Vietnam, the 1920s brought accelerating French investment, and Western influences, ranging from Hollywood movies to Marxism. But, despite the appeal of the ideals of the French Revolution, many Vietnamese people felt excluded.

Japan between 1573 and 1651 underwent massive political and social transformation. The warlord Oda Nobunaga began the process of reunifying the archipelago after nearly a century of civil war, a process that was completed by his junior ally Toyotomi Hideyoshi. More conflict, both domestic and international, led to a third warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, positioning himself and his family as the new dynasty of military leaders who ruled a thoroughly pacified Japan beginning in 1603. His son, the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, and grandson, the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, successively overcame diverse barriers to Tokugawa hegemony and incrementally established the early modern system that is often anachronistically assumed to have begun with Ieyasu. Their emphasis on pageantry, political immobility, strict control of borders, persecution of independent religion, and the constant threat of violence defined Tokugawa rule and allowed a fragile peace to persist until the mid-nineteenth century.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the political history of the Islamic world, from the seventh-century Arabian conquests to the formation, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the three great early modern Muslim empires: the Ottomans in Asia Minor, the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India. Its structure reflects the major political formations and transformations of this period: firstly, the Arabian ‘conquest polity’ which replaced the antique balance between Rome and Iran; then, after the demise of that empire in the mid-tenth century, the tumultuous era of ‘Berber’, Daylami and Turkic leaderships; finally, following the cataclysmic Mongol conquest of the eastern Islamic lands in 1258, the assimilation of these conquerors in the east and the political achievements of Turco-Mongol military strongmen and entrepreneurs in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Anatolia. It looks at the elites and political structures that shaped and underlay this history and at their interaction with Islam. This had developed into a more fully articulated and stable ideological system, whose continued success lay in the new elites’ capacity to adopt and adapt it to their needs.

The concluding chapter puts the book’s findings about the first year of the Syrian uprising in a broader context and restates the book’s contributions to the study of ethnic politics and violent intrastate conflict. It draws out the implications of the study for thinking about Syria in a state of civil war (2012–18) and its future governance and reconstruction (post-2018). It highlights the role of local network ties and connections to outside authorities in rebel governance, then discusses the ways in which state–society linkages might be reconstructed or made anew and their role in governing Syria in the future.

Chapter 5 deals with the provision of security in areas of limited statehood. We contest the notion that areas of limited statehood are mostly violent places where civil war prevails. We analyze peacekeeping missions, military interventions from the outside, as well as externally promoted security sector reform. We find that more limited external governance fostering inclusive post-conflict peace-building and security sector reform is more effective than comprehensive state-building efforts. We then look at the conditions under which violent non-state actors can provide public security in the territory that they control. Warlord governance tends to be rather ineffective. Rebel groups score better, particularly when they face high legitimacy needs and local communities with strong trust-based action capacity to hold them accountable. The chapter also looks at tribal groups and leaders as rather effective peace-keepers. They normally lack military enforcement capacity, but can rely on strong social norms to maintain security in communities. While “security under anarchy” is possible in areas of limited statehood, our findings cast serious doubts on whether public security governance can be sustainable in the long run, if a (state) monopoly of the use of force is not restored at some point.

The containment of violence was central to the mission of medieval Japan’s warrior governments, the Kamakura (1185-1333) and Muromachi (1336-1573) shogunates. It was also vital to the survival of the warlords who vied for supremacy in the war-torn sixteenth century. The two shogunates received their mandate to govern from the imperial court. They became, therefore, keepers of public order; the violence of political adversaries was by definition criminal and partisan; the force with which the shogunates responded was an act of peacemaking. With growing political turmoil in the fourteenth century, the shogunate attempted to finesse distinctions between intolerable aggressive warfare and acceptable defensive warfare. The second shogunate collapsed in the sixteenth century and the frequency and pitch of armed confrontations grew dramatically throughout the provinces. The most successful among the rising warlords began to claim the right to legislate on the sole strength of their success. Relying on noexternal source of legitimacy, their laws drew power from the much greater severity of their punishments and the much fuller delegitimisation of all violence other than their own, as seen in the abolition of all distinction between offensive and defensive violence.