This chapter examines the ambivalence and tension generated when the putatively universal premodern category of sāsana (referring to the full range of material and ideational aspects of the Buddhist community) aligns uncomfortably with the more bounded modern category of the nation-state. Through its association with existing polities, sāsana has been effectively mobilized to encourage or defend violence against non-Buddhists and against coreligionists, sometimes producing the complicated phenomenon of “Buddhist nationalism.”

Antarctica (Figure 3.1) is at the forefront of the climate change crisis. We know that it is an important player in global circulations of the atmosphere and the ocean, and that the gain/loss of ice on the continent exerts a major control on sea level. We are also aware that Antarctica has been pivotal in modulating past climate change and sea levels. This appreciation has only been achieved through scientific research over the past fifty years – a remarkable evolution in understanding, considering it was a remote and unknown continent in the early 1900s. Indeed, the first expeditions in which targeted scientific discovery was the sole focus date only to the late 1950s. Considering the rapid evolution in our understanding of Antarctica’s ice sheet, and the continent on which it flows, it is worth taking time to review briefly how we arrived at this point.

This chapter dispels the guiding misconception of Buddhist pacifism, historically and textually, with reference to its origins in the early transmission of Buddhism to the West and the influence of mistranslations of ahiṃsā in the distorting modern discourse of “nonviolence” versus violence. At the same time, it highlights the Buddhist ideal of nonharm and the nuanced ways in which Buddhists applied compassionate values to the avoidance of armed conflict, the effective and ethical conduct of warfare, and postwar reconciliation.

This chapter surveys the intertwining of religion (both Buddhism and Shinto) and war in the history of Japan, including: Buddhism’s initial introduction and subservience to the state in the 6th century; the emergence of warrior-monks (J. sōhei) in the Heian era; and the role of Buddhism in the samurai-dominated medieval period. Of particular interest to Western readers will be the emphasis on samādhi-power, acquired through Zen meditation, which was cultivated among the samurai class prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, contributing to the fanaticism that emerged in the modern Japanese Empire.

While many accounts of early Christianity see the early Church as a pacifist movement, closely following Jesus’ non-retaliatory teaching, this chapter argues that there is a more ambiguous relationship to violence in the first three centuries of the Christian movement, including military service. Aside from the violent rhetoric in the eschatological parables of Jesus, Christians appropriated the violence of the Hebrew Bible to shape negative views of outsiders, which in turn prepared the way from actualised violence in the post-Constantine era.

This chapter examines the development of the just war idea in Christian thought from its beginnings through its taking classic shape until the early modern period, when it became the basis for the idea of the law of nations while also remaining as a religious concept in both Catholic and Protestant thought.

Christian liturgy and ritual underpinned the practice and ideals of holy war and especially the Crusades (11th–16th centuries) in the medieval Christian imagination. As the mechanism of connecting the salvific and eschatological to the secular events of war and warfare, the liturgy – in the form of knightly blessings, votive masses for war, and penitential processions – articulated and sacralized the ideology of holy war throughout the period.

The Arctic is a region that has been understood very much through its environment. Issues of nature and environment have been central themes investigated by both anthropologists and geographers. Much canonical work by geographers and anthropologists has focused on investigating environmental and cultural interactions, using concepts such as landscape, site, or place. The academic disciplines of geography and anthropology have therefore contributed to the process of making Arctics. This chapter examines these contentions.

Within the scholarship on ‘U.S. state and empire building in the longue durée’, Alaska plays a surprisingly small role.3 Past the sizable shelf of studies on World War II, the region also vanishes in the literature on the early years of the global Cold War, despite Alaska’s geopolitical prominence and the corresponding effects of additional defence spending, construction, and employment in the period leading up to statehood in 1959.4 Support for (essentially concurrent) statehood in Alaska and Hawai’i was unquestionably ‘entwined with the buildup of both territories as major Cold War defense installations’.5 To rectify that double oversight, and to draw together periods frequently rendered discrete, this chapter uses the United States (US) military, an institution pivotal to the establishment, expansion, and direction of Alaska as a settler colonial society, to stitch together a century of Alaskan history.

The chapter highlights the place of spiritual purification in the Islamic ethos and its relation to physical jihād. Tracing such ideas from early Islam, the chapter considers the jihād in the era of the Crusades and the ways in which pietistic motifs were essential components of jihād preaching and practice.

Almost 100 years ago, the American Geographical Society (AGS) published an edited volume titled Problems of Polar Research, which started with the assumption that much remained to be learned about the Arctic and Antarctica. Edited by the geographer W. L. G. Joerg, an employee of the AGS, the volume contained chapters by many of the leading polar authorities of the day, most of whom were active participants in exploration and science.1 ‘Problems’ had a double meaning: the authors referred to inadequacies and gaps in the contemporary state of knowledge, but also to the excitement of the potential for advancing understanding in difficult conditions. The volume sought to inspire its readers to think further and address the challenges. We approached this present volume with a similar view.

The Soviets liked to build cities. Armed with a worldview that explicitly valorized urban life as a more advanced stage of history, the revolutionary regime that ruled the former Russian Empire from 1917 to 1991 created new settlements throughout its terrain. Part of the thinking was that a predominantly peasant country had to embrace industrial modernity in order to achieve socialism. But the longing extended to places, usually near mineral deposits or in militarily strategic locations, that had few to no rural populations anywhere in the vicinity. With the constant discovery of rich reserves of natural resources, the Soviet north became one of the most rapidly urbanized areas in the USSR. Several hundred industrial cities, towns, and workers’ settlements were built from scratch there, often in previously uninhabited territories and by drawing in completely migratory populations. While eleven permanent towns existed in the Soviet far north in 1926, there were already forty-one in 1933.1 By the 1960s, this number had increased to over 500 big and small industrial settlements.

This chapter considers foundational Buddhist thought and the relevance (or not) of modern just war theory. A just way to think about war, conduct war, and repair harm from war from a Buddhist perspective would be to stop the endless cycle, to avoid war altogether by accepting responsibility, and addressing the catalytic harms that perpetuate it.

This chapter explores the role of early modern non-state actors in organized martial conflicts to understand how diverse social formations define “war” prior to the institution of the nation-state system. Exploration of how such actors interacted with states, and often operated independently of them, enhances our understanding of the multiple locations of organized violence without the assumption of state formation as a goal and allows greater appreciation of the sometimes dispersed nature of martial coercion.

The European quest for a passage by water across North America long pre-dates the nineteenth century, but it was to be then that it took on the urgency of national achievement, and it was to be one man – Sir John Franklin (1786–1847) – whose career came to symbolize the entire era. It may seem an ironic honour, given the disaster that his final expedition of 1845 became, but it must be remembered that the search for his ships was the spur for many more expeditions than had been launched before him. As Joseph Conrad noted in his 1924 essay “Geography and Some Explorers”, ‘This great navigator, who never returned home, served geography even in his death. The persistent efforts, extending over ten years, to ascertain his fate advanced greatly our knowledge of the polar regions.’

The first written description of the muskox was published in 1744 by Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit and historian, within a description of ‘New France’ (the French colony of North America) in his multi-volume Journal d’un voyage. He describes an animal encountered in the area of Hudson Bay with long, beautiful hair and a musky smell in rutting season – and he gave it the name boeuf musqué.1 Musk was originally a label for the odour from the gland of a male musk deer, a native of Asia, which was used in perfumes, but animals with similar type odours were given musk names, like the muskrat and musk shrew. Charlevoix’s original descriptor for the animal stuck: it became muskox in English, moskusokse in Norwegian, myskoxe in Swedish, Moschusochse in German, and stayed boeuf musqué in French.

To claim Russia as an Arctic empire requires some consideration of both the concepts of Arctic and empire. First, despite the fact that little of Russia’s imperial territory lies above the Arctic Circle, its rulers have nonetheless long governed predominantly cold lands and seas – colder, in fact, than many places north of the circle.1 Therefore, this chapter will discuss Russian activities that sometimes occurred far outside a strict geographical understanding of the Arctic. These include the area known as the ‘Russian North’ (Russkii Sever) around the White Sea basin and to the south along the Northern Dvina River and its tributaries. It also includes the northern Urals and large portions of northern Siberia. Very little of Siberia lies above the Arctic Circle, but much of this part of Eurasia experiences Arctic conditions. Treeless permafrost predominates north of 60°.