Suicide is not simply a typology of violence. All forms of violence are interrelated, and preventative action should tackle the common antecedents to all. Understanding what these are, and how they differ between regions and cultures, is key to developing effective violence prevention strategies that extend beyond suicide. In this chapter we discuss the relationship between suicide and other forms of violence including analysis of data from the World Health Organization. We then consider factors influencing volume and direction of violence including gender, poverty, drug and alcohol misuse, adverse childhood experiences, war, and natural disasters. Before finally moving on to preventative action that considers all forms of violence under the same framework. Throughout the chapter real-world examples will be given for important concepts with particular reference to self-immolation in South Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean Region as it is the authors’ area of research expertise.

What should we make of the dramatic appearance of the Leveller leader John Lilburne in Hatfield Level in 1651, at the height of a decade of anti-improvement riots? This unusual contact between central radicalism and rural unrest destabilises binaries between a zealous minority driving civil war conflict and indifferent provincial subjects. Fen projects instead expose the pluralism of political ideas in seventeenth-century England. These crown-led ventures polarised notions of justice and became entangled in the events and debates propelling the English civil wars. In Epworth Manor, commoners across the social spectrum asserted an inalienable ‘just right’ to wetland commons in the face of royal and republican coercion. The strength of customary politics extended far beyond the parish, becoming a powerful means to articulate opposition to improvement in conflicts that moved between wetlands and Westminster. Central governors ultimately struggled to exercise a monopoly over legitimacy or violence in Epworth, where collective action across almost a century repelled efforts to turn their commons into theatres of state power and national productivity.

In contemporary discourse hubris is usually adduced as a dangerous state of mind, a form of pride or over-confidence which leads to downfall. This has its origins in the view once conventional among classicists that for ancient Greeks hybris was an arrogant disposition, offending the gods by exceeding mortal limits. This did not accommodate the fact that in many Greek states hybris was the term for a serious criminal offence, usually involving violence or sexual abuse. My Hybris (1992) successfully located the concept within the category of ‘honour’, and it is now widely agreed that hybris involved both arrogance and dishonouring behaviour towards others. Disagreement, however, persists over the balance to be struck between the two. This chapter reviews the debate, partially revises my earlier account (which underplayed the dispositional element) and insists that other-directed behaviour is equally essential to the concept. Using case studies from Sophocles and Herodotus, it concludes by restating the crucial distinction between hybris and related, but not necessarily pejorative, expressions such as pride or ‘thinking big/unmortal’ thoughts.

This chapter argues that Soviet crimes at times of war were both widespread and complex in their origin, goals, logic, and trajectory. It distinguishes and explains several forms of Soviet criminality during its defensive war against Germany in 1941–1945: crimes against humanity and war crimes, both perpetrated by agents of the state and often in accordance with explicitly formulated state policy; troop crimes, not guided by state policy but often understood to be in its fulfilment by the perpetrators; and a variety of violent and criminal behaviour emanating from small group bonding, both within the military and outside of it. The chapter explains their origins and charts the reasons why there was so much silence about the criminality of the Soviet war effort after victory.

The relationship between states and their militaries has long been a subject of social enquiry. Most nation-states have their origins in war, formed and reformed by external conflict and civil wars. Yet the military aspects of state power are intimately tied to all other aspects of state power in relation to its industrial, entrepreneurial and global dimensions. Having discussed the ways in which militaries shape and constrain transition pathways through innovation and their everyday conduct as well as the exercise of violence and war, the chapter explores potential to transform the military state arguing that at the heart of transforming the military state is the need to rethink security, possibly along the lines of ecological security. In conjunction with efforts to embed more ecological thinking in relation to security, a prerequisite for such a shift is a revisioning of the goal and purpose of the economy as proposed in Chapter 4, at least in richer countries in the first instance.

The chapter offers an ethnographic study of a court trial of a former judge of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, who was accused of lying in his lustration statement about his past links with communist secret services. Through an observation of the court proceedings, analysis of the court file, and life history interviews with the judge, the chapter engages the questions of violence, guilt, and responsibility. In particular, the chapter focuses attention on the notion of “communist guilt” and the subjective effects of public shaming, and highlights the ways in which lustration articulates the entangled problems about socialist-era state violence and neoliberal capitalist violence, around which rightwing populist groups mobilize. In conversation with the work of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt, among others, the chapter suggests a notion of political responsibility to address this entanglement and thinks past the narrowly construed, individualized, guilt-driven understanding of moral and legal responsibility.

This chapter develops a theory to explain why counterrevolutions emerge and succeed. This movement-centric theory emphasizes the strategies movement leaders embrace, which, more than anything else, define the capacities and interests of the old and new regimes during the post-revolutionary transition. All revolutionary governments enjoy an initial power advantage over the old regime. Whether a counterrevolution emerges depends on how much capacity these old regime forces have left and how much their interests are threatened by revolutionary rule. And whether their counterrevolutions succeed depends on how effectively revolutionaries can preserve their initial capacity through the tumultuous transition. Specifically, the chapter lays out a post-revolutionary “governance trilemma,” which requires new leaders to simultaneously manage the concerns of lingering old regime forces, elites in their coalition, and popular groups who supported the revolution. The chapter then explains how these dynamics differ following two ideal-typical forms of revolution: radical-violent movements and moderate-unarmed movements. Counterrevolutions are less likely to emerge following extreme versions of both movements – because the former lowers counterrevolutionary capacities and the latter lowers their interests in restoration. However, counterrevolutions are more likely to succeed against moderate-unarmed movements, because they establish governments that lack key tools for effectively navigating the governance trilemma.

This chapter draws on the original cross-national dataset of counterrevolutions to examine global patterns and historical trends in counterrevolutionary emergence and success. It begins with a series of statistical analyses that support core elements of the theory. Counterrevolutions are much less likely to topple radical-violent revolutions than moderate-unarmed ones – a finding that holds across two different measures of these types. Subsequent analyses shed light on the mechanisms behind this relationship: loyal armies and powerful foreign sponsors are key to defeating counterrevolution, whereas robust parties matter less. Next, the chapter shows that counterrevolutions are most likely to emerge following revolutions with medium levels of violence, which leave the old regime with both the capacity and interest to launch a challenge. Further, there is little support for four alternative explanations, particularly when it comes to counterrevolutionary success. Next, the chapter evaluates how key events during the post-revolutionary transition (like land reforms and elections) affect the likelihood of counterrevolution. It concludes with an exploration of the decline in counterrevolution since 1900 (followed by an uptick in the last decade), which it traces to a combination of the changing nature of revolution and shifts in the distribution of global power.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

The coda to the book reads the contemporary author Craig Santos Perez to reflect on the violence of US territory making and the role of literary language in reorganizing its effects. I provide a close reading of Perez’s from unincorporated territory and its orientation toward the modernism of Claude McKay. By reworking McKay, Perez makes a contribution to cartographic literature that helps to see the US map as a dialectical image, provisional and contingent as opposed to authoritative and final.

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments, findings, and contributions of the book. Counterrevolution is a subject that has often been overlooked by scholars, even as counterrevolutions have been responsible for establishing some of history’s most brutal regimes, for cutting short experiments in democracy and radical change, and for perpetuating vicious cycles of conflict and instability. The chapter reveals some of the most important statistics from the book’s original dataset of counterrevolution worldwide. These statistics raise a number of puzzling questions, which motivate the theoretical argument about counterrevolutionary emergence and success. After previewing this argument, the chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, including to theories of revolution, democratization, and nonviolence; to ongoing debates about Egypt’s revolution and the failures of the 2011 Arab Spring; and to our understanding of the present-day resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide. It finishes by laying out the multi-method research strategy and providing an overview of the chapters to come.

Once women’s appearance in public space is accepted, the tensions concern how they appear. Self-representations of gender identity are performed in part through differences in hejab (required modest clothing) and bodily comportment, varying from women in chadors moving through the traditional local spaces of the bazaar to secular cosmopolitan women styling their own performance of transnational independence. But women asserting their presence in public face harassment and the threat of violence, especially when stepping into the street, using public transportation, and asserting their right to social and spatial mobility. Vigilantes (the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, the “Spider Killer”) and gangs (the “Black Vultures” and the “Wolves”) targeting women can defend their attacks as morally justifiable, while the government has initiated programs of “social security” that primarily have sought to control deviations from approved forms of hejab. Nonetheless, women insist on their right to the city and their freedom to be fully present as women in public, whether by negotiating their personal space in a taxi or challenging the arguments of their attackers face to face.