Historians have argued that sixteenth and seventeenth century English colonial charters claimed the lands of indigenous people on the basis of their discovery by Europeans. Examination of these charters, however, demonstrates that a charter authorized acquiring land from the indigenous population in a specific region, not seizing indigenous it, and regulating the entry of other potential settlers. Charters also regulated overseas relations among the European nations to reduce or prevent international conflict by recognizing similar claims to monopoly of access to lands claimed by other developing empires. Charters were rooted in a medieval legal tradition that included canon law commentaries that recognized the legitimacy of infidel dominium and papal bulls that sought to regulate fifteenth-century Iberian expansion in the Atlantic. English charters built on this legal tradition and were a stage in the creation of a European legal order for overseas expansion. The fundamental issue was regulation of the sea and sea routes to Asia and to the New World, not the acquisition and possession of indigenous land. The English charters should be understood as elements of the long-running debate about whether access to the sea was open to all or could be closed to outsiders.

Much of the scholarship on the history of Iranian cinema considers film spectatorship in the first three decades of the 20th century as a leisure practice with origins in royalist and elitist entertainment forms. However, a close reading of archival material from this era reveals that cinema's significance extended well beyond its role as a pastime, as it became engaged in the governance of the self and disciplinary strategies of the state in Iran's experience of modernity in the early 20th century. In this article, I reperiodize the history of cinema in Iran by demonstrating the entanglement of cinema in popular nationalist discourses on education prior to cinema's institutionalization in the 1930s. Drawing on newspaper articles, film announcements, official documents, and poems, I show how, despite the absence of a centralized cinema institution in the 1910s and early 1920s, cosmopolitan citizens in dialogue with global trends promoted cinema as a means for the governance of selfhood and moral edification in the service of national progress. With the appropriation of cinema by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s, cinema was used as a technique of governmentality that aimed to conduct the conduct of individuals and shape an Iranian civic society.

In the decade following independence, the Tunisian state embraced secular feminism as part of the single-party monopoly on political life and economic development. Yet its celebration of new family laws as an aspect of modernization was marred by anxieties about the sexual and moral implications of modern womanhood. Tracing references to the miniskirt in presidential speeches and the women's press, I demonstrate how efforts to delineate the boundaries of proper appearance gave tangible form to the amorphous question of morality. Parallel concerns about long-haired youth further indicated the bourgeois basis of the modernizing visual aesthetic as it restrained young men. Through fashion, urban educated women utilized the press to negotiate the limits of the more politically sensitive topic of state feminism. Middle-class debates about dress reveal that nationalist secular feminists who benefitted from the state's definition of women's rights questioned hegemonic conceptions of womanhood and articulated alternate versions of masculinity.

This article will explore two relatively neglected features of the Irish Republican Army’s (I.R.A.) guerrilla war between 1919 and 1921: internal discipline and forced participation. The gravest disciplinary measure was the death penalty and I.R.A. orders directed that it should apply to members guilty of certain offences against the army. While British army and police officials often insisted that the I.R.A. executed its own without scruple, the death penalty was rarely carried out in practice. General Headquarters (G.H.Q.) was largely unsuccessful in applying a standard disciplinary code and there was also a general inconsistency and lack of rigour in applying other punitive measures for less serious offences. On a related theme, it was not uncommon for soldiers to be ‘conscripted’ or forced to take part in operations under duress during irregular warfare. In the Irish case, this idea has rarely been discussed. It will be argued here that, along with the death penalty and strict punitive measures, forced participation was an uncomfortable idea and often counter-productive in practice. The nature and extent of discipline and coercion was also firmly dictated by local conditions and personalities.

Since 2011, Arab states have faced unprecedented challenges to their territorial integrity. Movements in Kurdistan, southern Arabia, and Cyrenaica have all made unilateral bids to secure administrative and coercive control over territory. While some disavow secessionism, their agendas for separation clearly undermine their respective parent state, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Added to this is the Islamic State (IS), intent on breaking all the borders of the region and establishing a new caliphate. It is easy to see the emergence and empowerment of these movements as steps in the crumbling of artificial colonially constructed states and the reassertion of more ancient and organic clan, sect, and tribal allegiances. Yet these movements represent less a reversion to primoridialism than a reassertion of claims to self-determination that had been overridden in the course of 20th-century state formation.

In order better to understand the impact of political unrest in Ireland on Irish troops fighting in the First World War, it is necessary to acknowledge that the role of the 1916 Rising has been significantly overestimated, while the influence of the 1914 home rule crisis and the repercussions of the anti-conscription movement have been underestimated. The 1914 home rule crisis significantly impacted on the Germans’ view of the Irish and conditioned the treatment of Irish P.O.W.s from December 1914 onwards. In addition, the post-1916 Rising executions and the conscription crisis had a severe impact on Irish front-line units, while also sapping the morale of other British combatants. The 1916 Rising might have been dismissed as a military operation conceived by a handful of republicans, with little support from the wider population, but the conscription crisis brought about widespread defiance towards British rule throughout the whole of nationalist Ireland. In line with British public opinion, British front-line officers and men strongly resented Ireland’s refusal to support the war effort at such a crucial moment. The consequence was the widespread targeting and stigmatisation of their Irish comrades-in-arms. Some British officers and men resorted to a form of psychological pressure, aimed at the public shaming of Irish troops. This article draws on new primary sources available at The National Archives in London, Dublin City Archives and University of Leeds Library to argue that the 1916 Rising was not the only political event in Ireland to have repercussions for Irish battalions fighting in the First World War.

This article introduces a newly discovered essay by W. E. Gladstone, ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’, originally published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1834. The introduction examines the context of the essay’s composition, relating it to the young Gladstone’s commitment to the confessional state, as well as to the contemporary debate over the appropriation of the revenues of the Church of Ireland. It then attempts to explain how – through a combination of political circumstances, Gladstone’s subtle reshaping of the historical record, and editorial confusion – a significant article, published in a major Irish journal, went virtually unnoticed for more than 180 years. ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’, the text of which is reproduced here in full, constituted Gladstone’s first attempt to use the quarterly press to influence public opinion, anticipating his first book by four years, and what had previously been considered his first journal article by nine years.

The apparent fixity of the state has been produced by state-building projects, but also by the logic of state analysis that needs an object for its study. Encouraging critical reflection on the essentialism often associated with these processes, Pierre Bourdieu argued that these two aspects of “state formation” are contingently and epistemologically intertwined: “to endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) the thought of the state.” Others, including Ellen Lust in her essay, have focused on state-making practices, and their symbolic and material effects that produce and reproduce the state as dominant idea and as ultimate institutional frame in a particular time and place. Taking this further, Kevin Dunn frames “‘the state’ as a discursively produced structural/structuring effect that relies on constant acts of performativity to call it into being.” It is this performative aspect of state making in all its variety that will be the focus here, echoing themes in the pieces by Lisa Anderson and Rabab El-Mahdi.

In English the terms “political system” and “political regime” are used to distinguish different constructs. The first was initially developed by behavioralists such as David Easton and Gabriel Almond to replace the older, institutionalist term, the “state”; the second typically designates the arrangements for producing a government. In Arabic, though, the words “system” and “regime” both translate as niẓām. This piece argues that when millions of citizens across the Arab region came out in 2011 chanting al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām, those chants marked a critical juncture in a long process reflecting the end of not just the existing regimes, but also the states as we knew them. Whether defined in terms of governing institutions and capabilities, as Lisa Anderson, Ellen Lust, and Ariel Ahram do, or in terms of discourse, imagination, and symbolic power, as Ellis Goldberg and Charles Tripp do, the state was withering away long before the uprising. Concomitantly, the heightened levels of repression and shifts within official discourse by the changing ruling elite after the uprisings signal a perceived threat to the state itself, and not just to a particular regime. And while this piece focuses on Egypt, unlike some of the other contributions in this collection, I argue that the nation-state, as a conceptual and material construct, is being challenged.