This chapter turns to the analysis of the practice of justifying force in the ‘semi-peripheries’, i.e., in non-‘European’ States. The purpose is to see whether legal arguments were also developed and whether they differed from the ones brought forth to justify bellicose endeavours in the ‘centre’. It focuses on four case studies: the European intervention during the Greek War of Independence (1827); the French expedition in Lebanon and Syria (1860); the western intervention during the Boxer Revolt in China (1901); the Monroe doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary with special attention to their application in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century (1909–1912). It argues that, although these interventions rarely gave rise to full-blown wars, the justifications brought forward did not substantially differ from the ones used in the ‘centre’. States, in fact, carefully developed legal arguments and evidenced how their actions were meant to redress a previous offence.

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).

The first chapter describes how plans for liberal internationalist government began within the extended Bloomsbury group, as a moment of queer cosmopolitan disaffiliation with imperial order. The chapter opens with a mysterious set of letters written in protest against the Boxer Rebellion, one of the last wars of Victorian liberal imperialism. These letters, supposedly written by a Chinese consul, in fact are penned by a central member of “Edwardian Bloomsbury,” G. L. Dickinson, a Cambridge mentor to E. M. Forster who will be crucial to plans for formal international government after the First World War. Dickinson generates connections between Cambridge and May Fourth Modernism in China, through his friendship with the poet Xu Zhimo. It argues that the affiliations of Dickinson, Forster, and Xu Zhimo provide a model for thinking through an interwar modernism defined by cosmopolitan friendship, queer disaffiliation from the nation, and a strong attachment to liberal governmental institutions.