Chapter 9 begins by evaluating the intelligence war's effectiveness against rural IRA units, particularly in the republican heartlands of south Armagh, east Tyrone and Fermanagh. The East Tyrone and Newry IRA did face setbacks. Nonetheless, in many rural areas the IRA’s elusive nature made the organisation difficult to infiltrate and restrain. I explore why rural IRA units were often hard to infiltrate. The resilience of rural units, particularly in south Armagh, provided momentum for the IRA’s campaign in terms of arms, explosives and expertise, which had even been transferred to high-profile IRA operations in England by the 1990s. I also detail how, in England, IRA activity had increased in intensity by the 1990s. IRA attacks in England alongside the ability of the IRA to import various consignments of heavy weapons from Libya suggests that the IRA leadership had not been infiltrated at its highest levels. I provide reasons to explain the lack of infiltration of IRA units in England and the IRA leadership. Examples discussed in the chapter include the effectiveness of the British Army watchtowers in south Armagh, and intelligence operations carried out against the IRA in England during the 1980s.

Across East Asia, the period after the Mongol retreat was one of rebuilding and reordering. As they solidified political power, new regimes in China, Korea and Japan aggressively established authority over the religious realm, demanding compliance with moral and ritual norms, managing certain types of religious pluralism and violently crushing deviant devotion and organised religious resistance. Violence pervaded religion itself. Theological exploration of ideas such as cosmic destruction and rebirth, divine retribution, enforcer deities and the morality of killing for a greater good created stylised roles for both victims and perpetrators of violence. These themes manifested differently across the region. After Japanese militarists destroyed Buddhist mountain strongholds, lay armies defending the dharma fought with the ferocity of the faithful. Persecuted Christian converts willingly met martyrdom in the Catholic idiom. In China, the undercurrent of millenarian ideas that circulated through banned texts and teachings proved impossible to contain. These ideas could quickly militarise in response to stress, feeding a devastating cycle of rebellion and repression that continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across the region, temples and monasteries fought for resources, and religious affiliations often provided a spark for local tensions to erupt into organised violence.

Over the course of more than a millennium, the ancient Greeks and Romans put hundreds of millions of animals to death in acts of sacrifice, yet also developed the first vegetarian literature and made animals subject to legal proceedings. This complex situation affected major trends in ancient philosophy, such as Pythagoreanism, and also ancient cosmological concepts. To some degree, philosophy and religious custom clashed with one another, and philosophers and other writers responded by trying to moderate, ignore or avoid this conflict. Missing from the ancient literature is any concept of animal rights. Scholarship on animal sacrifice, much of it fascinated by the subject of sacrificial violence, has given anthropological and zoological explanations for ancient practices, but has not reached a consensus on why sacrifice was widespread, or on how it fitted into ancient paganism as a whole. Recent writing on the rights and status of animals has only begun to influence scholarship.

From its inception, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (better known as the Khmer Rouge) emerged as one of the most violent and brutal apparatus of state terror and murder since the Nazi party held power in Germany. Between April 1975 and January 1979, approximately 2 million people died from starvation, disease, exposure, torture, murder, and execution. The dominant interpretation of the Cambodian genocide presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist, and autarkic regime seeking to reorganize Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian political economy. From this vantage point, the victims of the regime perished because of misguided and irrational economic policies, a draconian security apparatus implemented to instill terror, and the central leadership’s fanatical belief in the creation of a utopian communist society. It is no so much that previous accounts are inaccurate as much as they are incomplete and theoretically vapid. To this end, I argue that CPK policy pivoted around surplus agricultural production and a selective engagement with the global economy as informed by its allegiance to the Non-Aligned Movement. Accordingly, I challenge the standard historiography of the Cambodian genocide by providing an analytical overview of the structures of violence set in place by the Khmer Rouge.

The concluding chapter returns to the main themes and highlights the issues analyzed in this book. The entanglements of grassroots action with the world of European colonialism, politics, and economics during the Second World War forced rural and urban classes alike to seek a role in shaping both the economic and political worlds of which they were a part. The demand for agricultural products drew a sizable portion of the population directly into the politics of war production and the ideological debates upon which the Allied fought against Germany and Nazism. By supplying needed manpower, producing essential goods, and participating in the vigorous intellectual debates of the period, Nigerians generated new discourses about self-determination and equal rights and experimented with postwar reforms. Situating Nigeria’s participation in a global conflict through the lens of colonialism and ties to the British Empire, this chapter demonstrates the significance of Nigeria in one of the greatest moments of historical significance that shaped the world in the twentieth century. The conclusion draws attention to the entangled webs of relationships and connections between the metropole and the colony and how the war ultimately created opportunities for self-determination during the turbulent years of its aftermath.

Viewed, as it often still is, from a neo-Romantic perspective, chivalry becomes a force for order and hedge against violence, but this represents decidedly post-medieval conceptions. European medieval chivalry actually constituted the ideals and practices of the warrior elite, elaborating views on licit violence, lived piety, valorized status, gendered relationships, and the distribution of wealth. This chapter takes chivalric violence as its focus, carefully distinguishing when medieval sources are describing reality and when they present idealistic plans for reforming knighthood. The search is for authentic knightly frames of mind and courses of action. Clearly, they needed some framework to guide their demanding lives and as elite warriors obviously essential in their world, they could choose and shape working codes that met their needs and simply ignore or modify troublesomely restrictive conceptions thrust at them. Of the many sources close to practicing knights used in the chapter, two receive special emphasis, the History of William Marshal (the biography of the manor cross-Channel knight of late 12th and early 13thC) and the Book of Chivalry (written by the leading French knight of mid 14thC). Both show the powerful role of this warrior code emphasizing the role of prowess in the search for honour, sustained by religious piety showing divine blessing on knighthood as one sustaining society.

In the period 1600–1868 Japan shifted from incessant civil war of the Warring States period (1467–1600) to an era of extended peace that lasted more than two centuries. This early modern experience, defined as it was by the absence of warfare, is quite remarkable in world history. It was a peace, however, imposed by a large-scale military aristocracy, the samurai (6–7 per cent of the population), who disarmed other social groups (commoners) below them in the social hierarchy and forbade them from carrying weapons. Although this created a type of garrison state, samurai were constrained legally in their ability to freely use their weapons, a long and a short sword. Moreover, the extended period of peace resulted in two currents of tension related to samurai identity: a dynamic tension between the civil arts, or the arts of peace (bun) and the military arts (bu); and a tension that arose from the lack of opportunity for samurai to demonstrate their martial skills and valour on the battlefield, resulting in a hypersensitivity in defending their honour. This chapter explores how a culture of honour violence developed among male samurai during the centuries of the Tokugawa peace and considers its importance in the construction of samurai masculinity.

This chapter critically analyzes Nigeria’s status as one of Britain’s imperial possessions and its strategic importance during the war. This chapter shows that the mantra of the “people’s war” was effectuated through the systematic implementation of new policies and regulations, changes in existing economic policy, and specific regulations introduced to garner support for the war. This chapter then demonstrates how Nigerians were subjected to even greater demands to fight in what was seen as a glorious defense of civilization against barbarism. It presents how Nigeria was woven “into the tapestry of British warfare and Britain’s presence on the world stage as the foremost power,” to use Ashley Jackson’s expression. It argues that government policies during the war conveyed a highly paradoxical attitude toward colonized peoples: consistent with the goals of imperialism as an economic venture on one hand, and on the other, with the Allies’ commitment to the preservation of liberty and self-determination through specific wartime colonial policies.

Violence was intrinsic to chattel slavery in the New World, and within slave societies in particular. This chapter analyses the level and forms taken by physical violence, especially corporal punishments meted out to enslaved men and women of African descent in early English and French North American and the Caribbean colonies. Violence was a daily reality within every economic unit relying on slave labour, although the intensity of it varied in time and space. The main reason why slaveholders used physical violence was to constrain their enslaved labourers to work and to accept their conditions. Violence against slaves involved masters as well as non-slaveholders and the public authorities. The pervasive and extreme character of violence in slave societies fuelled a debate on the need to regulate it. All social actors acknowledged its prevalence while describing contrasted regimes of violence and ascribing different meanings to the various forms taken by chastisements. Descriptions of violence create two opposite impressions: violence against slaves remained arbitrary, but at the same time it tended to become normalised. The slave system also sparked violent reactions from enslaved men and women.

This chapter summarises the main themes of the book, placing individual chapters within diverse thematic frameworks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of human violence, it introduces the Palaeolithic and Neolithic beginnings of human violence before examining prehistoric and ancient warfare. This includes considerations of the role of farming in the Neolithic, the more specialised warfare of the Bronze and Iron Ages, the era of classical antiquity and the growing importance of osteoarchaeology in understanding early violence. The discussion then continues with the other themes of the volume: intimate and collective violence; religion, ritual and violence; violence, crime and the state; and representations and constructions of violence.

This chapter explores the relationship between law, crime and violence. It begins by setting out a fairly standard historiographical narrative that, as polities coalesced and became more powerful over the course of the Middle Ages, so the law and legal mechanisms which underpinned political structures of power became more efficient.The rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest of Roman law in late eleventh-century Italy and a subsequent emphasis on Roman law in medieval Europe, is presented as pivotal. This paradigm is, however, then complicated in a number of ways. The legal prosecution of violence continued to be dependent upon the cooperation and involvement of communities. The courts’ growing interest in equity and the examination of fact as well as just law, further problematizes the picture. Roman law co-existed alongside customary law and canon law; this kind of pluralism is set beside the diffusion of justice across fragmented political units. Vengeance continued to be a powerful motivator both in episodes of interpersonal violence, and in the logic underpinning the law itself. Far from contributing to a state monopoly of violence, law most often aimed to channel and circumscribe violence rather than entirely to prohibit it. The essay ends by examining the methodological implications of these considerations.

Chapter 3 investigates the Nigerian home front. Nigeria, with its huge reserves of men, food, and raw materials, was critical to the Allied war effort. Nigerians from all walks of life, diverse regions, and various ethnicities were involved in the struggle to win the war. They were deployed as soldiers and workers, on a large scale, to theaters of war in Europe and the Middle East. The optimism expressed by colonial officials regarding support from the dominion and colonies, and the confidence that they would join the empire in the war with Germany, were not in vain. The notion that all people, including colonial subjects, were united by a common cause and a moral war fought against a common enemy drew Nigerians of all classes into a global fight against tyranny. Yet Britain embarked on a systematic extraction of human and material resources on an unprecedented scale. The drive to produce and the regulations put in place to control the local economy and meet wartime requirements created economic crises that were often ignored by the authorities. This chapter details the significant role played by Nigerians at home and the impact of the war in transforming their lives and societies in very fundamental ways to reveal its truly local and global impact.

This chapter explores the intelligence war’s impact on the IRA in its urban heartlands of Belfast and Derry City between 1976 and 1998. In Belfast, there was a decline in IRA attacks during this period, partly as a result of infiltration and surveillance. Nonetheless, I argue that there was also a decline in IRA attacks, primarily because of the need to avoid civilian casualties occurring on a regular basis, in order to sustain Sinn Féin’s vote. By the 1990s, the Belfast Brigade had recommenced a commercial bombing campaign that would cause extensive financial damage and necessitate the continuation of security installations and patrols. In Derry City, the IRA’s campaign was more of a persistent nuisance by 1994. But this decline was not because of the intelligence war. Rather, it was largely that the SDLP had begun rebuilding the city for nationalists. The IRA risked a decline in electoral support if they attacked the city infrastructure again. The evidence provided does not suggest that the Belfast and Derry City IRA Brigades called a prolonged ceasefire in August 1994 primarily because of the intelligence war. Chapter 8 also debates the impact of suspected agents and informers on the Belfast and Derry City IRA, including the Stakeknife and Raymond Gilmour cases.

This chapter explores the role of violence in classical Athens and its relationship to Greek society and politics from the later archaic age to the classical period. It focuses closely on both Athenian democracy and Athenian law, especially in the literature and forensic speeches. It begins by analysing the changing relationship of the state to the individual alongside the declining place of violent retribution in solving what increasingly became legal disputes. It then moves on to assess the significance of Athenian law and the role of the law courts in meditating violent encounters. Finally, the chapter examines the role of violence in Athenian politics in the fifth century BCE, especially with regards to the oligarchic revolutions at the end of the Peloponnesian War.