The intelligence war had had minimal impact on the IRA’s campaign by June 1972. Various factors explain the limited infiltration by intelligence services of the city and rural areas where the IRA was operating at that time. In urban areas, IRA support increased following the active role played by republicans in defending nationalist areas, indiscriminate British Army actions against the nationalist community and the lack of political and socio-economic reform by Stormont and Westminster. Other factors unique to rural areas restricted intelligence, included republicans’ long-term sense of injustice at being forced into a unionist-dominated Northern Ireland state in the 1920s. British forces also conducted various indiscriminate security operations in nationalist areas, such as in County Tyrone. These operations provoked further tension. The failure to coordinate British military and RUC Special Branch intelligence on a consistent basis made containing the IRA harder. In addition, IRA barricades in Derry City and Belfast, and the ability of some rural IRA units to use the border to evade detection, meant that surveillance of the IRA via vehicle- or personality-checking systems was difficult. The intelligence war’s failure to significantly erode the IRA’s capacity for conflict partly explains why the British government talked to the IRA in June 1972.

Attitudes towards what we term ‘domestic violence’ are hard to locate in the ancient Greek sources, but they do emerge in a variety of literary and artistic genres which span several centuries. This chapter explores some of the key evidence and, utilising anthropological theory, asks what kind of violent treatment women received at the hands of male relations, and why. Issues of honour and shame surface as key causes, and the chapter explores the fragility of male and familial codes of conduct and the consequences of their infringement. It becomes clear that the sources on violence towards women are not so infrequently encountered as to suggest that violence did not occur often, but show that violence towards women was so matter of fact that it barely deserved mention.

The chapter examines the broad contours of violence in the Roman world, from the private, personal plane of violence in social relations (where self-help was the order of the day) to criminality and the law, to the ideological underpinnings of applying violence to those perceived as threats to the community. Various facets of the Romans’ socio-political landscape had an impact on how they viewed and practised violence. Romans had an ideology of dominance inherent in empire. They accepted the brutalities of mass slavery, a hierarchical social system that ranked people according to group membership and assigned personal worth (or lack of it) based on that membership. Violence reflected and enforced these systems. What emerges is a picture of a world where violence was, in no small measure, the language of rank and status.

After the collapse of Rome Europe was dominated by relatively small powers. Its development, therefore, was different from that of China or some of the powers of the Middle East. Lacking continuous existence and permanent facilities armies depended on native skills which recruits brought with them. The retinues of the powerful, who could train and buy equipment, were at an advantage. In time they became predominantly mounted warriors, the knights. Infantry were never a negligible force, but without training they lacked the coherence to make their mass effective. In the later Middle Ages standing armies in Europe grew out of rising prosperity, the improving structures of a few states and the demands of continuous warfare. By contrast Mamluk Egypt developed a standing army by about 1240, while China always had one. The Mongols, by virtue of their way of life with its ‘native skills’, constituted a permanent army. Although improved metallurgy increased the supply of better weapons and armour, and experience in stonework led to better fortifications, the technology of war changed little. War remained up close and personal, an affair of plundering and, when battle became necessary, close-order formations fighting at close-quarters. Gunpowder, therefore, was a major challenge whose impact on war before the mid 15th century was limited.

Athletic competition played an important role in ancient Greek and Roman culture. From the earliest days, competitive athletics included the combat sports of boxing, wrestling and pankration. Though athletic combat sports continued during the Roman period along with the increase in agonistic festivals and retained their popularity and importance, the spectacle of gladiatorial combat itself also spread throughout the Roman Empire, including the Greek eastern sections. Combat sports presented the spectator with extreme acts of violence which were potentially even fatal. But that violence was controlled and purposive. It took place in ceremonial contexts – funerals, or religious festivals primarily – with athletes wearing special uniforms: nudity in the case of combat athletes and identifiable armaments for gladiators. The fights were not violent chaos or murderous free-for-alls, but regulated and controlled by rules and expectations, all monitored by referees and the watching people themselves. These games were able to give visible expression to the values and ideology at the heart of Greek and Roman societies: courage, skill and discipline, perseverance to victory against all adversity and at all costs, even one’s life, and the ostentatious demonstration of personal excellence. The public nature of the performances is critical: it must be seen to be legitimised. Victory in such combat was worthy of immortality.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.

This chapter investigates the intelligence war’s effectiveness against each regional IRA group between July 1972 and December 1975. Whilst the Belfast IRA suffered some operational difficulties because of British intelligence efforts, the Derry City IRA, rural republican units in Fermanagh, Tyrone and south Armagh, and the cells operating in England had not been damaged to any considerable extent by 1975. It is true that the number of deaths caused by the IRA had declined since 1972. But the republican movement had spread further across Northern Ireland and the borderlands of the Irish Republic. The IRA maintained a persistent campaign for reasons explored in this chapter. Northern Ireland remained politically unstable in 1975, and when the IRA called a prolonged ceasefire, this was not out of desperation. This chapter discusses important events in the intelligence conflict between 1972 and 1975, included the discovery by the IRA of the Four Square Laundry intelligence operation in Belfast in 1972.

This chapter employs the ‘mindful body’ and ‘web of violence’ models to survey the range of violence present in Britain during the Iron Age and Roman periods (ninth century BCE – fifth century CE). By recognising that in a community all forms of violence are interrelated and frequently share many causative factors, these models allow for indirect forms to be included (e.g. health inequalities). Iron Age Britain was inhabited by tribal communities, and the results are dominated by young adult males, who have the majority of the evidence for organised conflict, reflecting the presence of a warrior elite. Females and children show evidence for performative violence, with their bodies being broken down and transformed in complex rituals. Bioarchaeological data suggests an absence of evidence for abuse against children, older people and women. After the Roman conquest of 43 CE the evidence for age-, sex- and status-based inequalities substantially increases, and these are much more clearly defined and observable in the primary source and bioarchaeological evidence, particularly enslavement. Overall, health declines, and evidence for the abuse of vulnerable groups increases, principally in females. Ritual violence continues and is attested in deposits of disarticulated body parts associated with sacred spaces, including cemeteries.

This chapter shows that terror and violence were integral part of the Great Leap Forward in Mao’s China. From the outset of the collectivisation in 1958, terror and violence was used to whip those unwilling individuals into joining collectives. Mao conceived of the People’s Commune as an environment without legal safeguards, which operated strictly as a military organization, meaning that violence could be practiced with impunity. Terror and repression were used against a much wider population, and the level of violence intensified. For many, the practice of violence became a habit that needed no intellectual rationale. Endless ‘struggle’ meetings also provided opportunities for venting personal revenge and for other selfish pursuits. Grass-roots cadres used their positions of power to extract as much benefit for themselves, while punishing anyone they disliked or with whom they disagreed. To survive, peasants fought against peasants in the People’s Commune, and in some cases even family members fought one another. In the pursuit of Mao’s utopia, unleashed by totalitarianism, between 2 to 3 million people were tortured to death or were killed deliberately during the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1961.

During France’s turbulent ‘revolutionary century’ after 1780, historians of collective protest such as Charles Tilly and George Rudé have highlighted a crucial transformation in forms of collective protest after the mid-nineteenth century. From ‘reactive’ violence against new intrusions of the state and capitalism, food and anti-tax riots, to ‘proactive’ mobilisations through unions, election campaigns, strikes and demonstrations, these new tactics instead sought to gain influence and control over national institutions. This chapter uses several case-studies, ranging from the murder of royal officials in July 1789 to the protracted torture and burning of a noble in southwestern France in 1870, to question elements of this model. First, the transformation discerned by Tilly was neither sharp nor complete, and ‘proactive’ protest was already well in evidence at the time of the French Revolution. Second, a focus on the causes and types of violent collective behaviour has failed to analyse adequately the actual practice of violence, particularly the place of humiliation and the meanings of decapitation. Finally, however, we stress that insurgent crowds always tended towards verbal and symbolic violence – the use of threatening language, occasional destruction of property, and ritualistic action – that channelled violence within cultural limits.

Over its long reign, the Qing imperial state aggressively pursued unauthorized religion, both to uphold its own spiritual hegemony, and to avert religious militarization. With growing social dislocation over the nineteenth century, the dynasty faced a massive explosion of religious violence – a seemingly irrepressible series of millenarian “White Lotus” movements in central China, Muslim uprisings in the north and southwest, and the pseudo-Christian Taiping Rebellion that divided the country for more than a decade. Together, these rebellions and their suppression claimed the lives of tens of millions. The anti-Christian Boxer Uprising was brutally extirpated by a coalition of foreign forces, but at least as deadly were the waves of recriminations between Chinese villages. After coming to power in 1949, the Communist regime moved quickly to contain religion, expelling Catholic missionaries and initiating a suppression of native groups like Yiguandao. Policy towards religion appeared to soften in the 1990s, and yet remained highly vigilant towards any hint of millenarianism or religious sedition. Even knowing this, few observers were prepared for the sheer brutality of the 1999 campaign against Falungong (Dharma Wheel Practice).