This chapter canvasses information available in the Arab/Islamic canon on the subject of violence exercised against women in the early Islamic period. The Qur’anic verse in Surat al-Nisa’ (4:34) which gives the husband the right to correct a disobedient or recalcitrant wife, generated a massive exegetical. This chapter begins with a discussion of the exegetical tradition pertaining to this verse and comments on the divergences between the Islamic legal schools and the differences of textual interpretations between theologians and jurisconsults. The second section refers to anecdotes that reveal the conflicts and tensions in private relations, the harmfulness of domestic intimacy, and the dynamics of household violence. The final section discusses episodes describing public violence against women, especially in the streets of Baghdad, the ʿAbbāsid capital. Beyond the rich exegetical tradition, the information tends to be scarce and fragmentary and relies mostly on literary texts makes it difficult to disentangle fact from fiction.The material draws for us, nevertheless, illustrations of certain widespread conceptions in Muslim medieval literary approaches to violence against women and the social context in which the textual edifice was constructed.

Through most of human history, displays of violence, either between humans or animals, have been an integral component of sport. Violent sports have been global in reach and they have extended across every social rank, though they have been largely a male domain, with many societies placing restrictions on the extent to which women might participate in sports of any kind whether as participants and spectators. Yet the period since 1800 has witnessed an unmistakable redrawing of the place of violence in sport, with many societies becoming considerably more squeamish about sports that manipulate or showcase aggression between men or animals for entertainment. The West initiated legislation prohibiting animal cruelty in the nineteenth century, and these extended, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, to other parts of the globe in the twentieth century. There has also been a global move to restrict the degree of interpersonal violence in martial arts, boxing and wrestling, and although hand-to-hand combat sports remain popular across the globe, regulation has sharply reduced the risk of death or serious during competitive events. As a result, the period 1800-2000 has witnessed new controls on the degree of violence permitted in sport.

This chapter examines the origins and early history of violence in the Japanese Islands, focusing on the Jomon (c. 14,500–900 BCE) and Yayoi (c. 900 BCE– 250 CE) periods. For several reasons the Japanese archipelago is a good place to think about links between violence and historical change. It possesses a long sequence of hunter-gatherer settlement that can contribute to ongoing debates over violence and agriculture. Hunter-gatherers in the Japanese Islands display great diversity due to both ecological and historical factors. The fact that many in prehistoric Japan were engaged in plant cultivation, leads us to a third factor: if agriculture was an important stimulus behind organised warfare, then at what point along the continuum between forager cultivation and full-scale farming did violence take on that new mantle? Finally, the position of Japan at the periphery of the East Asian world system offers the opportunity to investigate the role of ‘tribal zone’ and similar colonial processes in contexts very different from those theorised in the existing literature.

Trained violence was a central forum for establishing the relationship between Chinese dynastic governments and their subjects. Because training in the use of violence (martial arts), along with access to weapons, determined an imperial subject’s effectiveness in carrying out violence in the service of the state, or in resisting the will of the state, imperial governments were always concerned to confine skills and weapons to those loyal to the state. Not only did different dynasties solve that problem differently at the beginning of their rule, the institutions governing training in violence changed over time in response to a government’s evolving society and external threats. Seen in this light, a state’s control over trained violence and access to weapons is a direct reflection of that state’s evaluation of its subjects’ loyalty and commitment to dynastic goals.

This chapter will present both a history of the concentration camp and a consideration of why this institution is so important to modern consciousness and identity. Briefly tracing the concentration camp’s origins in the colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it then stresses the significance of World War I, which saw the internment of civilians and POWs on a large scale. It then examines the Nazi camp system and the Stalinist “Gulag” and compares the totalitarian countries’ use of camps with those of other, neglected settings, such as the American internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, Franco’s camps during and after the Spanish Civil War, Britain’s use of camps for Jewish DPs in Cyprus trying to reach Palestine after World War II, and the colonial powers’ resort to camps during the wars of decolonization, such as in Kenya. By offering a survey of the history of concentration camps in a global setting, the chapter is then able to engage with the philosophical literature dealing with the question of what the camps tell us about the nature of the modern world.

This chapter examines the historical development and cultural significance of what has become known as “extreme violence” in western cinema: the visual depiction of violent action and its physical effects in a way that is particularly explicit when compared with cinematic norms and therefore more impactful. While there are myriad ways in which screen violence could be considered extreme, the three primary elements that usually come into play are: (1) visual—the explicit detail of physical bodily damage, often achieved through close-ups and detailed make-up special effects; (2) temporal—an uncomfortable duration in which the violence is held on screen for a period of time longer than would typically be considered narratively important; and (3) emotional—intense depiction of suffering and pain, often through close-ups of the human face in agony and the sounds of screaming. Throughout the history of western cinema various films have achieved levels of violence considered to be “extreme,” although not all of those films are still defined as such, having been surpassed by even more extreme levels of violence in contemporary filmmaking. How those definitions have changed tells us much about the interrelationships of social and political sensibilities, changing ethics, and the ever-evolving aesthetics of western filmmaking.

By the middle of the first millennium CE in China the notion that the unseen world, while capable of offering respite from the perils of our world, was itself full of danger was shared both by Daoists drawing on earlier local ways of thinking and by Buddhists who incorporated beliefs originating in South Asia. In reality the this-worldly economic success of the monastic establishments of the latter tradition attracted occasional episodes of forced, often violent laicization at the hands of the state, while eschatological ideas drawn from both traditions nourished for some alternative visions of the future that also triggered violent clashes with the authorities. Exhortations to devoutness meanwhile could spur self-inflicted violence, whereas the summoning of demons to injure others was recognised and forbidden in the legal code. As our sources become more plentiful from the end of the first millennium onward, we learn more of the sometimes sanguinary content of popular religious eschatology, while it also becomes clear that the imagery of violence was commonplace in a wide range of religious contexts and that in situations such as those of foreign invasion or political collapse fear of demons could prompt unrestrained and merciless violence against outsiders.

A majority of IRA leaders agreed to a ceasefire in late December 1974 because the British government suggested privately that they were contemplating political withdrawal. This chapter also suggests that the ceasefire collapsed because the British government would not announce their withdrawal before a political settlement had been agreed. The British government feared that a declaration of intent to withdraw would provoke a loyalist uprising. Republicans did not trust that the British government would withdraw without a public or private declaration. Many grass-roots republicans felt tricked by the British government into a ceasefire that they began to believe had been designed to degrade the IRA’s armed capacity. However, evidence suggests that, in 1975, the British government wanted gradual political withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Many leading republicans were willing to politically compromise during that year and potentially accept an independent Northern Ireland. But pressure from grass-roots republicans meant that the leadership had to demand a British declaration of intent to withdraw.

This chapter starts by locating the common association of religious violence with Christianity and late antiquity in a Protestant polemic which was further developed by the Enlightenment. New approaches have started to question this master narrative, however, by highlighting the limited number of temple destructions and other paradigmatic acts of religious violence, contextualising religious violence within the prominent role played by violence in the later Roman Empire, and dissociating violent language from violent acts. Moral principles and specific understandings of religion and history produce a Christian discourse that makes violence highly visible because the church is associated with peace and society with violence. Two well-known case studies illustrate the point. First, the destruction of the Serapeion in Alexandria (391 CE) allows us to notice how the historian Rufinus constructs a narrative playing on Christian understandings of martyrdom and pagan, sacrificial violence. Second, the letter of Severus of Minorca on the conversion of the Jews (418 CE) is not an aggressive tract to promote widespread conversion of the Jews, but a defensive document that tries to free Severus from accusations of having stirred up violence.

In world history, steppe nomads have acquired a reputation for nearly unmatched wanton brutality, but rarely has such violence been examined in its political and social contexts. This essay examines violence among the pastoral nomads of Inner Asia –with a special focus on the nomadic empires originating in Mongolia and Manchuria – by looking at three separate aspects. The first of these concerns violence as a means of political action, especially in connection with royal succession or competition within an aristocratic milieu. It further explores, as a second aspect, intra-nomadic violence, as reflected in various types of intertribal conflict, possibly related to phenomena of political centralization as well as competition over economic resources. The third level of analysis refers to large-scale wars by nomads against non-nomads, most typically agricultural societies that were invaded and conquered by the nomads. This latter type of violence is the best documented because of the availability of plentiful sources from literate societies, but not necessarily the most representative. This chapter will also touch on elements that potentially contributed to increasing the level of violence, such as political and cultural resistance, improvements in armament, environmental conditions, and co-optation of non-nomadic soldiers.

This chapter surveys the history of terrorism from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Terrorism is defined here as a strategy that uses symbolic violence that seeks to change the behavior of the many by targeting the few. After a brief historiography of the phenomenon, the chapter discusses the origins of modern terrorism in the nineteenth-century paradox of growing individualism and state power; thus, while terrorism can be used in pursuit of any ideology, it is closely associated with the emergence of modern democracy. Particular attention is paid to the role of violence in the French Revolution, early efforts to theorize and organize conspiratorial violence, and three late nineteenth-century terrorist movements: revolutionary terrorism in the Russian Empire, white supremacist terrorism in the United States, and anarchist terrorism in Europe and the United States. The essay uses primary and secondary sources and includes a lengthy annotated bibliography.

State violence in early medieval China was characterized by bloody patrimonial politics that contributed to the high degree of political volatility of the period. Like other times in Chinese history, individual monarchs and dynasties came to power through force of arms and kept order by implementing Chinese legal-bureaucratic systems that legitimized violent punishments. The political instability of the early medieval period often can be traced to the informal, patrimonial political ties that intertwined the court, harem, bureaucracy and military. Males and females of the imperial family, eunuchs and generals became involved in the struggle to rule directly or place a puppet on the throne. Winners frequently killed rivals and their adherents. State violence appears to have been most intense during the periods of political division from 220 to 589 and 907 to 960 when “China” was separated into two or more states with relatively frequent internecine conflicts at courts, interstate wars and dynastic transitions via warfare or usurpation. The geographically unified Sui and Tang empires, lasting from 589 to 907, also were disrupted episodically by bloody conflicts at court and rebellions in the provinces.

This chapter explores the visual sources for violence and warfare created over the millennium from 500 to 1500 in the lands where Islam became a major presence. It divides the copious evidence into three chronological blocks (early, middle and late) to highlight the different visual sources that predominate in each period (architectural decoration, portable objects and illustrated manuscripts). The many scenes of violence depicted on these buildings and objects reflect the unsettled times and places where they were made and the constant occurrence of battles and warfare, some of it with sophisticated weaponry. But these vignettes of warfare and fighting also reflect a more positive view of violence, designed to invoke the prowess and heroism of the object’s owner. This triumphal theme extends to nature and the animal kingdom, as man dominates and tames the often-inhospitable landscape and the wild beasts in it. Many incidents also allude to the legendary and literary past, particularly in Iran, and metaphorically tie the object’s owner (and the viewer) to epic heroes. These many scenes of violence are thus multivalent and require decoding.

The two centuries from 1800 to the present day are marked by the increasing efficiency of the means by which humans inflict violence. The myriad causes of violence differ little, if at all, from the other periods analysed in the first three volumes of this collection – greed, envy, lust, anger, vanity and shame produce interpersonal violence while differences in race, language, religion, class or creed are common prompts justifying mass-scale violence. The novel aspect of the years explored in this volume largely revolves around the impact on violence of technological advances. The energy unleashed in the Industrial Revolution spurred the rapid growth in technologies supporting the execution, organisation, annotation and representation of violence from 1800. The digital revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries accelerated many of these trends with the advent of the capacity to move information instantaneously around the globe. This volume examines the impacts of this technology-enhanced efficiency with its large-scale acts of violence – mass deaths in minutes – hitherto unseen in human history. It also tracks the ways that increased access to stories of and information about violence has changed public perceptions of the parameters of legitimate violence at both the mass and the interpersonal level. The decreasing public appetite for violence exists simultaneously with expanding, new forms of leisure which have rendered representations of violence banal.