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.

The fragments on the ancients and the moderns are continued. Arguments are presented for and against the role played by the ancients in establishing a modern culture of genius and taste. The effect of writing on oral poetry is discussed together with the invention of paper, printing, and copper engraving. These had an important effect on poetic expression and public culture, and the advantages and disadvantages are weighed. The Middle Ages ended with the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, changes in the financial system, in war, and class relationships. German literature is discussed in relation to other European traditions, and its shortcomings and merits are considered. In conclusion, it is argued that comparison of the national poetic traditions is difficult, perhaps futile, and that every nation should value its own tradition.

Analyzes the outcomes of my cases and argues that the use of armed force is very unlikely to result in military or political success.

Divided nations as a source of international conflict and war, patters of conflict, and reasons for their intensification and reduction.

Reviews the empirical and conceptual findings, makes forecasts about the future likelihood of the use of force in each category of conflict, the role of learning and non-learning in the decline of war, why the great powers are still more committed to the use of force than other states, and the prospects for weaning them from violence.

Explores the origins of rump states and the reasons why they have been among the most aggressive states of the last 100 years.

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.

An overview and justification of the project, differentiation from previous book on war, description of research methods and data set, and discussion of theoretical and empirical premises.

The modern world has been shaped by imperialism, a practice engaged in by all great powers and some lesser ones. Empires are history but their consequences are not. Their dissolution has given rise to a multitude of new states, restored independence to formerly independent units, and reduced the size and influence of former metropoles. Decolonization, whether peacefully or violently accomplished, has given rise to a series of new conflicts among successor states, among neighboring states, and between metropoles and former colonies. We might lump these conflicts together as post-imperial. If so, many kinds of conflicts would fit under this rubric. They could encompass colonial and postcolonial conflicts, rump states, partitioned countries, and arguably other categories as well like revenge and regional rivalries. I have accordingly opted for a finer-grained analysis.

Napoleon Bonaparte was never going to be an easy character to put onstage, from the initial fears under the Directory about staging a living general to the Restoration’s horror at divisive memories of the Empire. Yet theatrical versions of Bonaparte or allusions to him were no stranger to the boards and tell us much about the construction of Napoleon’s image, indeed, the Napoleonic legend itself. Although there were certainly productions we would qualify as ‘propaganda’ promoting Napoleon, not all theatrical appearances or allusions were positive, and the bureaucratic censorship system often lagged behind audience interpretations, leaving room for derision via lateral censorship at any theatre, from the Opéra and the Variétés in Paris to Lyon’s Théâtre des Célestins. In this sense, censorship offered contemporaries a space for political subversion to advance another model of France, even at the height of imperial rule or under the restored monarchy.

The chapter traces a period of growing self-confidence in Irish letters that might seem surprising in the context of the post-Waterloo recession but takes some of its charge from the strength and eventual success of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Between 1815 and 1830, Irish writers felt able to look more closely at the island on their own terms, a move that meant for many a new interest in coastal locations and the shaping force of the sea. The chapter proposes new watery co-ordinates for mapping Irish romanticism via the cases of Gerald Griffin, Charles Robert Maturin and Jeremiah Joseph Callanan.

This chapter explores how the concept of the collective entered into and helped to shape important works of literature during and after the Second World War. It takes the ubiquitous wartime speeches of Winston Churchill as a key site for articulating the idea of the ‘people’s war’, offering a reading of these ubiquitous texts. In relation to Churchill’s version of a collective wartime identity and experience, the chapter looks at writings by H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, all of whom wrote passionate and deeply felt works that offer their own assessment of the idea of people’s war, or of the collective more generally, as a social project. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that the problem of the collective in wartime is a central one in literary modernism.

This chapter analyses the social mechanisms that facilitate the transformation of micro-level solidarities into coherent nationalist narratives. The aim is to explain the paradox: while the armed forces are highly nationalist institutions, most ordinary combatants detest nationalist rhetoric on the battlefield. Drawing on interviews with combatants who fought in the 1991–1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina together with the analysis of mass media reports, the chapter examines how deep bonds of micro-solidarity forged in violent experiences are transformed into coherent nationalist discourses.

The manipulation of risk and uncertainty by decision makers who are more or less rational and are experiencing more or less fear offers a first cut of the crisis (section 1). A second cut enriches the individual-level analysis by attending to organizational malfunctioning as a potential cause of inadvertent nuclear war. In this analysis political agency is widely dispersed across many layers of the American and Russian militaries (section 2). A symposium on nuclear politics refers briefly to “very innovative” work on nuclear issues without engaging with work in science and technology studies (STS) (section 3). Exemplifying large world thinking, it does away with dualities such as rational and irrational, politics and technology, risk and uncertainty. It integrates human agency, organizational functioning and malfunctioning, and politics across all levels. And embedding the observer fully in a world that does not exist “out there,” it acknowledges the importance of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. In the politics of the crisis, its meaning for different actors, and its effect on shaping the complementarity of risk and uncertainty language matters hugely (section 4). The analysis of nuclear politics has shaped profoundly a widely accepted rational model of war (section 5). And the conclusion illustrates the evolution of a crazy nuclear politics (section 6).

The Russo-Japanese War makes several contributions to the dialogue between the historical record and the theory of war. First, it shows how war due to commitment problems requires not only shifting power but also a state’s inability or unwillingness to control its power. In this case, Russian uncertainty over Japan’s willingness to fight explains both the outbreak of war and Russia’s expansion into Manchuria in the first place. Second, it shows how fighting can make commitments credible that weren’t beforehand: by disabusing Russia of its optimism about war with Japan. Third, the modern theory of war can explain why Japan’s share of the peace settlement didn’t reflect its dominant military performance: The deal reflected the likely outcome of a fight to the finish, pitting Japanese military superiority against Russian access to credit. Finally, the war’s outcome – Russian weakness and subsequent recovery – is a proximate cause of World War I.