Chapter 7 links specific violations of Gellner’s congruence principle to ethnonationalist conflict within and between states. While it is generally accepted that violations of state-nation congruence can cause conflict, less is known about which configurations increase the risk of either civil or interstate conflict, and how these conflict types interact. Inspired by Myron Weiner’s classic model of the Macedonian Syndrome, this chapter proposes an integrated theoretical framework that links specific nationality questions to both conflict types. Using our spatial data on state borders and ethnic settlements in Europe since 1816, we show that excluded and divided groups are more likely to rebel and, where they govern on only one side of the border, to initiate territorial claims and militarized disputes. Compounding the risk of conflict, rebellion, and interstate conflict reinforce each other where ethnic division coincides with partial home rule. We obtain similar, but weaker, findings for civil wars and territorial claims in a post-1945 global sample. After World War II, governments have typically shied away from engaging in interstate disputes to address nationality questions and instead support ethnic rebels abroad.

Here we begin fluid dynamics with the science of fluids at rest. This includes planetary science aspects of atmospheric and oceanic pressure, the forced and free vortex. Here also are introduced the three basic differential operators: grad, div and curl, which will be used throughout the book.

The introduction points out that changing human presence in the Pacific affected Japanese politics throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, the whaling boom of the 1820s to 1840s caused security anxieties among policymakers, while Japanese whalers by mid-century struggled with declining catch rates. Building on scholarship from Oceania, the introduction suggests thinking of Japan not as an island, but as a “Sea of Islands,” a terraqueous zone awash in currents such as the Kuroshio south of Honshu that allocate warmth, humidity, and nutrients and create a specific, though fluid, offshore geography in which consequential historical conflicts and competitions unfold. It lays out a set of questions that emerge from such framing and suggests conceptualizing the history of the Kuroshio’s catchment area as an oceanic frontier. This brings the historical significance of ocean, islands, and human travelers beyond the traditional human habitat to the fore. Since the seventeenth century, ongoing attempts at controlling this frontier has informed business practices and expansionist ideologies of Japan.

This chapter offers an overview of the Old Assyrian social world and the construction of Assyrian identity within it. The chapter finds that in the Old Assyrian period, Assyrianness was an important identity with impermeable boundaries.

Social networks are a valuable object of investigation in historical sociolinguistics, as they can contribute both to the onset of change and to the maintenance of linguistic norms. However, their characteristics make them complex to analyse, as their intrinsic variability may hinder the identification of phenomena that span different networks across time and space. This chapter is focused on Late Modern English materials, to present new resources through which network contiguities can be studied; this is the case, for instance, with the exchanges of emigrants, political activists, scholars and business correspondents. After addressing a few methodological issues, the chapter presents an overview of the materials at hand and outlines how networks and coalitions have had an impact, not only on the usage of participants (as shown in recent studies) but also on how language has been perceived, described and codified.

This chapter summarizes the aims, scope, and contents of the book. Both science and humanism have evolved over hundreds of years, and both are associated with influential forms of inquiry into the world. Throughout this evolution, humanism and science have been intimately connected, in ways that are crucial for thinking about whether, as a significant strand of humanist thought contends, the sciences can (or can be relied upon to) enhance the welfare of humans, other life, and the environment. It is clear that there is no necessary connection between scientific inquiry and social or moral progress; the sciences have facilitated both significant goods and significant harms. Faced today with pressing challenges to the well-being of people and the planet, our attitudes toward science call for renewed scrutiny. With chapters spanning the history of entanglements of forms of humanism and science up to the present, and case studies of the value implications of the sciences, this book asks us to think about what relationships between science and humanism we should build for the future.

This chapter analyzes Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 coup, one of the most prominent counterrevolutions of the 21st century. Drawing on approximately 100 original interviews with Egyptian politicians and activists, it argues that Egypt’s counterrevolution only became possible when revolutionaries squandered their initial capacity to hold the old regime’s military in check and presented them with an opportunity to rebuild their popular support. Specifically, the chapter makes the following claims: (1) revolutionary forces began the transition with considerable leverage over the former regime, grounded in their ability to threaten a return to mass mobilization and their backing from the United States; (2) after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, his administration’s poor management of the post-revolutionary governance trilemma, particularly its decision to prioritize the concerns of old regime elements over those of his secularist allies, caused the revolutionary coalition to fracture and Washington to begin questioning its support; and (3) these developments created opportunities for the military to bolster its domestic and foreign support and sapped revolutionaries’ capacity to resist a counterrevolutionary coup. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that, though the task facing Egypt’s revolutionary leaders was not easy, a counterrevolutionary end to the transition was far from a foregone conclusion.

Chapter 5 addresses the puzzle of reversing state size, which is inconsistent with a Tillyan account of European history. We argue that border-change processes triggered by ethnic nationalism are the main drivers of this development. While unification nationalism increased states’ size in the nineteenth century, its effects were dominated by secessionism, which shrinks states. Irredentism, in turn, had no effect on average state size. Focusing on deviations from the nation-state ideal, we postulate that internal ethnic fragmentation leads to secession and reductions in state sizes and that the cross-border presence of dominant ethnic groups makes state expansion through unification or irredentism more likely. Conducted at the systemic and state levels in Europe and globally, our analysis exploits information at the interstate dyadic level to capture these border-change processes. We find that while nationalism exerts both integrating and disintegrating effects on states’ territories, it is the latter effect that has dominated since the twentieth century.

From the Blue Ridge overlook in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, USA, one can see the broad Shenandoah Valley, split by Massanutten Mountain, with more ridges and valleys in the distance (Fig. 9.1). This view of the Appalachian ridges and valleys provides a classic example of an eroded fold and thrust belt, where parallel ridges of hard, resistant rocks are separated by valleys underlain by comparatively softer rocks. Fold and thrust belt topography develops on folded bedrock structures called anticlines and synclines (Fig. 9.2). But this type of geologic structure is not without a long back-story. Most of the folded rocks underlying these mountains were originally deposited as flat-lying sediments, hundreds of millions of years ago. The folding occurred much later, driven by compressive forces associated with continental collision. Millions of years of subsequent erosion on these rocks were then required to give us the landscapes we see today.