Suicide is a neologism. First conceived in 1643 by Baconian polymath Sir Thomas Browne, it gradually entered enlightened parlance, universalised by Hume’s On Suicide. Previously, richly descriptive and differentiated depictions of the paradox of self-killing permeated the globe. Current research suggests a stronger fixation with self-killing in the West. Condemned by medieval theologians as the sin of despair, alternate tropes appeared during the Renaissance as humanists reintroduced classical models of toleration. Painters elevated Lucretia to the icon of Republican resistance. By the seventeenth century enlightened rationalism had emboldened John Donne to compare Christ’s passion to suicide. Nevertheless, popular culture and the authorities continued to punish the crime of self-murder harshly. Current research allows comparisons with Asia. In Japan, acceptance of seppuku and shinjū contrasted with condemnation for self-sacrifices by Christian converts. In India, Western observers alternately wondered naively at widow burnings (sati) or questioned their consensual nature. In Qing China, a cult of pious widows who killed themselves to avoid forced remarriage gained such popularity that the emperor introduced laws to moderate the proliferation of memorials. Ultimately, the interpretation of self-killing reveals much more about cultural values than it does about the state of mind of individuals performing the violent act.

This chapter offers an overview of Chinese warfare, c. 1500–1800, with an emphasis upon the way in which state-sponsored violence was deployed to counter the multitude of strategic threats faced by the Ming and Qing dynasties. It highlights the role of violence in maintaining and extending the power and legitimacy of the imperial Chinese state. For even if Chinese dynasties were wont to extol Confucian values of benevolence and pacifism, the harsh reality was that state-sponsored violence was generally the key to maintaining authority, both domestically and in the broader East Asian world. The chapter shows how recent secondary studies have explored many dimensions of China’s martial culture and how these studies in turn illuminate the array of military challenges that faced all Chinese dynasties. It offers a typology of military threats and situates them specifically within the late imperial Chinese context. Central to this analysis is the massive size and ethnic diversity of the empire, which posed unique challenges to the rulers and their military establishments. The chapter also offers suggestions for future work and comparative studies.

The violence of the Cold War takes up a unique place in the history of violence. The Cold War era is often described as an exceptionally peaceful time in modern history. In this scheme, the violence of the Cold War was primarily of an imaginary kind, which contributed to containing the outbreak of real violence especially among the industrialized nations of the West. The idea of the Cold War as a long peace or an imaginary violence, however, does not fit with how many communities in the broader world experienced the second half of the twentieth century, especially those that underwent the bipolarization of politics as part of the political process of decolonization. In these communities, the Cold War signifies an extraordinarily violent time, characterized by the crisis of civil war and the routinization of other exceptional forms of political violence, which affected intimate human lives as well as the order of political society. An understanding of the Cold War as part of the history of violence requires, therefore, coming to terms with the radical disparity in historical experience between the West and the postcolonial world.

Recent decades have seen the rise of violence related to Hindu nationalist movements in India, the Muslim Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the militant Khalistan movement of Sikhs in India’s Punjab, and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the region. These movements have competed in the context of a secular political order that was the legacy of British colonial rule, once embraced by founding leaders such as Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who advocated the nationalism of ‘secularism and socialism’. Though each of these political ideologies has its own history and internal dynamics, each is also related to the others. They have arisen as mutual responses to one another and to the global influences of colonialism, transnational religion, and globalization that have buffeted South Asian politics in recent years.

This chapter explores the genocidal intersection between political history and ethnographic geography in European or near-European regions where the traditional continental empires met the emerging hegemony of Western nation-states. In particular it considers how and why the introduction of nationalism proved toxic in these multicultural ‘rimlands’, with Macedonia and Thrace as illustrative examples. Here the wartime shattering of empires (1912-1948) and their succession by fiercely nationalist competitors resulted in repeated spasms of extreme zero-sum violence whose key outcome was the ‘unmixing of peoples’ by mass deportation, and/or annihilation.

The conclusion presents the key points of my argument that the intelligence war did not force the IRA into the peace process. I summarise the primary political factors that led to peace. The conclusion also identifies key themes for further research, including the regional nature of the conflict. In addition, I explain why this book demonstrates that the practice of 'talking to terrorists' in Northern Ireland and the politicisation of Irish republicanism were both fundamental to the creation of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

World War II differed from preceding wars on account of the fact that the mass killing of civilians was a strategic objective of the war. Nowhere did Axis forces kill more enemy civilians than in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. This chapter gauges the nature of Nazi violence by illuminating the impact that German killings of Soviet civilians had on the Soviet war effort. Germany’s war against the Soviet Union rested on a transgression of the moral norms of humanism, which Nazi leaders purposely disavowed to justify the promotion of a particularist racial ethic and the mass annihilation of racial foes. Both the moral provocation that defined the Nazi project and its cruel effects for people who were defined as antithetical to the “Aryan race” registered profoundly with Soviet observers. They seized on the nature of German violence to build a moral case about their own war effort, expressed in the antithesis between “Soviet humanity” and “fascist barbarism.” This narrative, replete with detailed information about German atrocities, was paramount in mobilizing Soviet people to fight Nazi Germany. While Stalin disavowed universal ideals after the war, this did not diminish their wartime vitality and reach, or the Soviet Union’s decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

This chapter provides an overview of sites of mass violence from Early Neolithic central Europe. It focuses on the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), for which several such sites are now known, more than on other Neolithic cultures. It seems that the victims of mass violence were buried, if at all, by inclusion in disorganised mass graves without any sign of post-mortem care. This indicates intentional non-conformity to the usual burial practices of the LBK and thereby wilful neglect of the funerary expression of victims’ individual cultural identities. So far, every newly discovered mass-violence site has revealed new facets of violent behaviour, including likely evidence for massacres, selected capture, torture, mutilation and systematic execution. The bioarchaeological complexity of these mass-violence sites necessitates highly comparative approaches for their interpretation that incorporate all sites where human remains have been deposited as well as their periodic reappraisal. Currently, warfare seems to be the most plausible reason for most of the group violence encountered in the LBK, especially the drastic massacres of settled communities. LBK massacre victims are characterised by perimortem cranial injuries, careless deposition in settlement contexts, lack of post-mortem attention, and the suppression of their cultural identity.

Exceptionally high levels of state-centered or “public” violence have been a distinguishing feature of the nineteen Latin American republics ever since the separation of nearly all of them, two centuries ago, from the monarchies of Spain and Portugal. Largely unbidden by those upon whom it was conferred, independence proceeded from 1808 to 1824 in ways that strongly conditioned the secular crisis of order that followed. Four phases of state making can be correlated with shifts in the nature and intensity of the violence that accompanied each of them. By the early twenty-first century, expansive state institutions nominally subject to the authority of liberal-democratic ideas appeared to be firmly entrenched in most of the region. If an organized and strictly political kind of violence had largely faded, other kinds of violence, newly contoured, surged to historic highs, within and around state institutions that for the most part flaunted their customary tolerance for varying levels of nonfeasance, incompetence and venality. The underlying, historically patterned failure was not that of the state per se. Rather, it was the shallowness of allegiance, across society, to the authority (in the contemporary case, that of liberal democracy) to which the state appealed as the source of its legitimacy.

Many of the canonical subjects of pre-modern art were tales of aggression, conflict, combat, and destructiveness; remembrances and forewarnings of disasters worldly and otherworldly; visions of wounding and dismemberment; parables of suffering, abjection, and pain. Yet medieval Christian thought and behaviour, which everywhere registered the ambivalent nature of violence, contemplated all these things in the absence of an encompassing definition of violence as a category of experience. Rather than strive anachronistically for an inclusive “iconography of violence” or map the correspondences between representations and realities, this contribution locates the significant of visual violence in its effects, in the rhetorical force of description, and in the unseen cognitive violences works of art could precipitate when they impressed the “sensitive soul” of the beholder. Beginning with a critique of the idea that violence comprises a coherent subject within European art, this chapter analyses images of warfare and the special challenge of the pre-modern battle piece; the sculpted imagery of violent struggle and predation in the famous Romanesque trumeau at Souillac's monastery church; ekphrastic and visual descriptions of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents; and the rhetorical elaboration of the Passion story's violence in the work of late medieval panel painters.

The introduction develops a history of Nigeria’s role in World War II that allows for a meaningful understanding of the conflict as multidimensional and instrumental to critical transformations in empire–colony relations nationally, transnationally, and internationally. It shows how Nigeria’s participation in the war as a colony of the British Empire profoundly transformed the relationship between metropole, empire, and colony, created a new sense of shared view and ideology, and shaped new cultural and political ideas in the postwar period. It addresses a major gap in the historical literature, including the dearth of information on the historical contributions of Africans in the Nigerian colony as participants and victims. It presents the thrust of this book as a significant contribution to the history of the Second World War in general that explores in detail the contributions of an African society and the impact of the war on that society. It surveys the history of the war by laying out the key features of local conditions (especially on the eve of the war), the war’s impact, and local responses. This chapter concludes that the impact of the Second World War cannot be generalized or the European experience equated with the experiences of Africans in European colonies.

Violence permeated every aspect of the slave trade. By the late eighteenth century, highlighting the violence in the trade was a central plank of an emerging abolitionist campaign against the institution. The slave trade seemed to presage the worst features of a developing merchant capitalism. It was out of step with rising Enlightenment ideas of sentimental attachment to others. It came to be seen as an almost uniquely horrible industry, one that, however valuable it was to European commerce, needed to be ended as soon as possible. But if the slave trade was a scene of horrors, it also aroused a different emotion – terror. The careful application of violence was central to every part of the slave trade experience. The anticipation of such violence was carefully used as a tool by participants in the trade to keep captive Africans in check, and helps to explain the transformation of African captives into enslaved persons. The terror of the slave trade can be seen graphically in James Field Stanfield’s The Guinea Voyage. Stanfield used mechanistic metaphors to describe the trade. He showed how captives and sailors were kept powerless so that the ‘vast machine’ could make money for British and African merchants.

The chapter explores how, as an ‘empire of difference’, Russia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries tolerated local law for lesser crimes among the empire’s diverse peoples but insisted on the tsar’s law for high crimes (murder, recidivist robbery and theft, treason and heresy and the like). The bureaucracy established a remarkable uniformity of documentary form, judicial procedure and legal norms across the empire. In local courts knowledgeable scribes, in the absence of a professional bar, juridical faculties and notaries advised governors who were untrained amateurs. Lacking jurisprudential expertise, criminal codes were laconic, workaday compendia of fines and penalties primarily intended to police official corruption. Punishment was primarily corporal, but in local courts violence was mitigated by judges’ use of mercy to preserve community stability and by their reliance on locals to staff court and executioners’ roles. Violence, in torture and corporal and capital punishment, escalated in the prosecution of highest crime (treason, heresy), but Muscovy did not conduct European-style theatrical spectacles of suffering until Peter I witnessed them in the 1690s. Even so, from the late 1600s Russia relied increasingly on exile and abolished capital punishment for all crimes but treason by the end of the eighteenth century.

When discussing violence in the Islamic milieu, the word jihad inevitably comes to mind, especially in the contemporary world. Jihad is almost invariably translated as “armed combat” or “fighting” in both academic and non-academic circles; and even as “terrorism” in politically-charged contexts. Such a monovalent understanding of jihad emerges primarily through consultation of the juridical literature and official histories that were produced after the eighth century of the Common Era and that are unduly privileged in academic discussions of this subject.

Jihad however emerges as a much more complex term when a broader range of primary Arabic sources are consulted. Such sources include the Qur’an and Qur’an commentaries (tafsir), collections of hadith, which refer to the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as legal works.The central premise of this essay is that a closer study of relevant Qur’anic verses and a comparison of early and late extra-Qur’anic sources drawn from the above genres allows one to chart both the constancies and shifts in the spectrum of meanings assigned to the term jihad.This in turn allows us to better understand how changing socio-political circumstances affected the way Muslim scholars of different stripes conceived of the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence over time.