This chapter examines how Judaism has negotiated the problematic of war with its standard of ethics from biblical to modern times.

The so-called Great Peace or Taiping Rebellion is one of the most destructive events of Chinese history. Indigenous beliefs in the efficacy of violence to fight demonic beings, including humans identified as such, were an essential element of this event, next to Christian and Confucian sources of inspiration.

The winds howled as the members of the First Combat Intelligence Platoon mushed their huskies through the darkness of an Arctic January day. Temperatures reached −43 degrees Celsius as the men scouted the river valleys and mountain passes of Alaska’s Brooks Range. This was no ordinary mission, and these men were no regular infantry. The platoon, comprised of soldiers from the Alaska Territorial Guard (ATG) – a military reserve force of Alaska Natives known as the ‘Eskimo Scouts’ – was the vanguard of the first reconnaissance survey of a petroleum pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope. In the early winter of 1945, three ATG patrols totalling eight men spearheaded a survey of a potential pipeline route from Livengood, north of Fairbanks, to Umiat on the North Slope. The men travelled over 3,200 km by dogsled in the middle of Arctic winter, battling snow deeper than a metre.

The introduction provides an overview of the link between religion and war, offering a broad sketch of classical legends, wartime ethics, national sentiments, and ritual traditions. This is followed by summaries of each chapter.

Christian millennialism served as a kind of lingo through which Americans debated politics and the country’s place in the world during times of war in the USA. Focusing on the role of ecumenical Protestant millennialism, this chapter details the ways in which ideas about the end of the world, combined with contested notions about the USA’s role in divine plans, fostered Christian nationalism and American exceptionalism from the Revolution to the war on terror in the 21st century.

Greenland has been peopled from the west by several different groups and only once – in the late tenth century ad – from the east, this time by Norse farmers from northern Europe. Unlike the mobile Arctic hunters, the Norse settlers were sedentary, and the society they established in southwest Greenland was based on the natural vegetation, hunting, and trade with their homelands. For almost 500 years the Norse population in Greenland thrived, and then it vanished for reasons not yet fully understood. Several explanations have been put forward: that the small Norse society failed because of inflexible social and economic strategies,1 or fell victim to a combination of unfortunate circumstances,2 or (as recently argued) suffered from organized and systematic violence by invading Inuit.

Archaeology in Sápmi – the traditional core area of the Indigenous Sámi people in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Federation – is a contested field of study, closely intertwined with issues of identity, ethnicity, and indigeneity, as well as conflicts over land and cultural rights. In recent decades, Sámi archaeology has emerged as a multidimensional and dynamic movement, engaged with the diversity of Sámi pasts and the complex interrelations between past and present. This chapter reviews current issues in Sámi archaeology and heritage management, and explores some of the political dimensions of archaeology in Sápmi and challenges that archaeologists and other researchers are facing in this field of tension.

Fighting or war is often reduced to the Arabic word jihād by both Muslim and non-Muslim authors. Such a conflation, however, elides a broader semantic landscape for the term jihād as indicated in a number of Islamic sources; this landscape is resurrected to a considerable extent in this chapter by consulting a broad range of primary Arabic sources.

In this passage from Beryl Bainbridge’s 1991 novel The Birthday Boys, Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the Terra Nova Antarctic expedition, recalls the reflections of his fellow explorer and friend, the naturalist and physician Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson. The conversation occurs while the men are together in a tent during a depot-laying expedition in March 1911. Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates and Apsley Cherry-Garrard listen in on the exchange, which is broken by the entrance of Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers. Readers of Bainbridge’s novel, well aware of the fate of the historical Scott and his polar party, including Wilson, Oates, and Bowers, would recognize multiple ironies in this scenario.

Pan-Islamism represents a radical search for Islamic unity and empowerment in the modern world. Today, Jihadi Salafists are the most aggressive proponents of pan-Islamic solidarity, yet paradoxically they are divided by intense ideological debates about sectarianism, anti-Muslim violence, and the need for a territorial state, rendering their movement ineffective.

When and why did the originally tropical being, Homo sapiens, enter the circumpolar north? What attracted human societies to this part of the Earth characterized by extreme seasonal variability, long periods of darkness, rough and cold weather, barren tundra, high mountains, ice caps, and vast areas of sea ice? Through analyses of ancient material remains such as stone-built structures, artefacts and bones preserved in cultural layers on dwelling sites, Arctic archaeology provides some insights into these basic questions about the expansion of human societies into the circumpolar north and how they managed to thrive there for millennia.

What drives the increasingly violent impulses of Hindu nationalism in India? This chapter emphasizes the abyss between, on the one hand, its anxieties about Hindu minoritization and territorial dismemberment and, on the other, its retrotopian visions about revitalizing a purported Hindu golden age.

Sikh warrior culture is rooted in the spirit of “speaking truth to power,” the Sikh notion of sovereignty, the idea of defensive warfare and the institution of the Khalsa. Its two integral features are hymns of surrender to an ineffable One and tales of excruciating but somehow gratifying martyrdom.

The history of commercial sealing and sealers’ lives can be understood within the context of capitalism. Sealing was traditionally carried out by different socio-cultural groups over time, mainly as a low-scale activity that attempted to meet the needs of specific communities (some examples including sealing by hunter-gatherers from Alaska and Tierra del Fuego, among others).1 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sealing acquired new features within the context of modernity, as it was transformed into a large-scale activity with a trading purpose. Commercial sealing responded to a market logic, and it helped to connect different contexts where the exploitation of resources, the manufacture of products, and trade in raw materials and industrial goods took place.