This chapter examines the early development of Constantine’s religious imagery following his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 ce. It argues that Constantine’s administration swiftly began portraying the civil war against Maxentius as a religious conflict, with Constantine defeating Satan through the aid of the archangel Michael. The chapter highlights the apocalyptic nature of this imagery, emphasizing Michael’s role not only as a heavenly warrior but also as a herald of the end times and Christ’s millennial reign. Scholars have overlooked both the early emergence of this imagery and Michael’s significance within it. While the imperial court may have believed in this narrative, its promotion in the aftermath of civil war suggests that not all Christians in Constantine’s new territories necessarily welcomed their new emperor.

This article advances four arguments about Constantine’s Roman Arch (315). First, it posits that its imagery and inscription endeavored to please a single viewer: the emperor Constantine. That argument narrows the interpretative possibilities regarding its meaning. From presumed anonymous observers of differing faiths, the field narrows to a single imperial viewer, a recent convert to Christianity and a victor in a civil war. Second, the lens of civil war illuminates previously unrecognized Augustan rhetorical and visual tropes that guided the Arch’s makers in legitimating the monument and Constantine’s victory against Maxentius. Third, the article uncovers Christian connotations in the arch’s inscription. Fourth, the neglected Christian subtext opens the possibility for identifying the Arch and the Colossus next to it as the first openly Christian imperial monuments in Rome. The article therefore demonstrates the syncretism of traditional imperial rhetoric and insignia with Christian ideas long before traditionally assumed.

This chapter provides a critical analysis of the material scope of NIAC and is divided into seven sections. The first explores the material concepts of NIAC pursuant to both CA3 and APII,  and explores how the drafters understood these  concept and how it has been interpreted in practice. Second, it examines the concept of NIAC contained in Additional Protocol II of 1977, looking at how its distinct identity emerged, as well as its specific material elements. The second section explores some of the legal and operational challenges that arise from the existence of two categories of NIAC, and in particular how the activation of APII can fragment the applicable legal regime, resulting in fluctuating levels of protection during NIAC. The fourth section undertakes a comparative analysis of the material scope and associated threshold of NIAC pursuant to the Tadić definition of NIAC (CA3) and that contained in APII, in order to identify areas of convergence and divergence. The fifth section explores how developments in both customary and conventional IHL applicable during NIAC have influenced its material scope and, in particular, the level of organization armed groups require in order to qualify as a Party to a NIAC. Following from the conclusions of sections four and five, the sixth section assesses the continued relevance of the distinction between CA3 and APII NIACs in practice.

At nightfall on 20 May [1947], I had just left the site where we maintained our radio communications equipment and was on my way home when two comrades suddenly appeared and seized me as I passed the entrance to this building. They said: ‘You walk past here every day. Today we would like you to come in for a chat.’ Since we were close to a sentry point and they had already seized me, resistance seemed pointless, so I entered the building with them. By coincidence, our equipment had malfunctioned that day and I had not been able to send or receive any messages, so when they frisked me, they did not find any incriminating papers on me. I was then taken to another room and told to wait. The sudden and unforeseen turn of events had made me panic and tremble, and my heart beat like mad, but I now got a moment’s respite and did my best to calm down. Worrying whether the terror I felt would be obvious, I sought to compose myself. I also thought about how best to deal with the impending interrogation.

Canada was under no obligation to engage in homesteading, nor did it face the types of threats to its sovereignty as the United States. And yet Canada quickly copied most of the US homesteading system because it still required a rushed occupation of its prairie provinces. Not only is the Canadian situation broadly consistent with the property rights hypothesis, but the special details of the Canadian system provide an additional out-of-sample test.

Chapter 4 examines the immediate aftermath of the Civil War when Congress, as part of Reconstruction, imposed the Southern Homestead Act on five southern states.

This chapter compares stasis to the modern conceptual category with which it is most commonly associated: bellum civile, or civil war. It focuses primarily on the “original” civil wars of the first century BCE but also considers subsequent cases that are similar in scale, duration, and the types of violence involved. Against existing scholarship, which tends to conflate stasis with modern conceptual categories, including but not limited to civil war, it argues that stasis was a historically distinctive phenomenon that differs fundamentally from its analogues in both ancient and modern societies.

This chapter focuses on the two Russian revolutions in 1917 and US responses to them. The Wilson administration enthusiastically welcomed the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy in March, quickly recognized the new Provisional Government, and extended large loans in the hope that a democratic Russia would stay in the war against Germany. But after radical, antiwar socialists seized power in November, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet regime, provided covert aid to anti-Bolshevik (“White”) armies, and sent small military expeditions to Archangel and Vladivostok. Contrary to earlier studies, the chapter shows that the United States sought to speed the demise of the Bolshevik regime. US forces fought directly against the Red Army in northern Russia and battled Red partisans in the Far East, while the American Relief Administration, American Red Cross, and Young Men’s Christian Association all aided White armies. Despite the interventions by the United States and its allies, the Bolsheviks prevailed. The legacies of these events included the US rejection of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia until 1933 and Soviet conceptions of Russia as a “besieged fortress.”

In this chapter we apply the theoretical model we introduced earlier to the behaviour of leaders to find out what alarms them, and under what conditions they are able and willing to order repression. We do not argue that we can accurately predict and explain every act of violence and repression. But we show how it helps us understand empirical patterns of repression. This model can inform our assessment of when we are most likely to observe human rights violations. To explain how context shapes human rights violations, we concentrate on why political regimes influence leaders’ threat perceptions and why democracies have the best human rights records, and why they do not always guarantee the protection of everyone’s basic rights. We outline the influence of mass dissent and of socio-economic factors. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how context shaped respect for human rights in six countries.

Shah Tahmasb (r. 1524–76), the second Safavid ruler, faced the immense challenge of establishing his legitimacy and power in the shadow of his legendary father, Ismail, the founder of the dynasty. The Turkic tribal chiefs of Anatolia, including the Rumlus, Ustajlus, Afshars, Qajars, and Takkalus, were often resistant to subservience, especially to a ruler they perceived as lacking the military might and charismatic authority of Ismail. During the first half of Tahmasb’s reign, this challenge was particularly acute.

To secure his rule and the loyalty of his chiefs, Tahmasb turned to the spiritual concept of ikhlās (purity of intention), a powerful moral code drawn from the Qurʾan and expounded in Sufi ethics. This concept, used to consecrate the bond of loyalty between the chiefs and their Sufi king, made the loyalty morally binding and more difficult to break. In the face of political instability, marked by civil war and a massive Ottoman invasion, the Safavid dynasty’s survival depended on this cultivation of sacred loyalty.

Despite his lack of immediate personal charisma, Tahmasb’s cultivation of consecrated loyalty solidified the chiefs’ allegiance and helped the Safavids endure their most perilous period, preserving both the dynasty’s cohesion and its long-term survival.

Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

For civilians who lived through the American Revolution, war, politics, and family life were inextricably linked. As the continent descended into civil war, violence seeped into daily life, with profound implications for the varied inhabitants of colonial North America, including Black, white, and Indigenous families; free and enslaved people; Loyalists and Revolutionaries; men and women. Civilians, even those who sought to avoid the war, inhabited a precarious position, subject to widespread violence, household invasion, and new, occasionally coercive, authorities and conflicting allegiances. These circumstances unsettled the power relations and hierarchies that governed daily life, disrupting political authorities, social interactions, labor arrangements, and economic exchanges. Rippling throughout Revolutionary society, military conflict and political shifts exposed deeply rooted societal fissures, particularly regarding race, class, and gender. Recognizing this, poor white men, white women, the enslaved, and free Black colonists advocated for a more expansive, inclusive definition of liberty – a fight that has persisted beyond the war.

In many ways the American War of Independence failed to revolutionize American performance culture. After the wartime ban on theater, the resurrected theatrical repertoire quickly reverted to British classics, with a sprinkling of German and French dramas thrown in. Musical performances continued to evoke familiar British folk tunes, comic operettas, or tragic operas. Parade and holiday culture drew on longstanding European forms such as charivari or other genres to celebrate the “perpetual fetes” of the wartime and postwar period. What then would prove “revolutionary” about American performance culture after the war? What could the former colonists proclaim as their own unique and substantive contributions to the cultural life of the new nation?

The book ends by tracking the legacy of the Minorities Commission. The commission set a precedent for managing minority anxieties as Nigeria entered nation-statehood in 1960. It also failed to resolve the political tension these anxieties caused, leaving the newly independent Nigerian state with a crisis of citizenship that lingers to this day. This crisis of citizenship informed the national breakdown that led to the devastating civil war (also known as the Biafran War, 1967–70) and the ongoing fragmentation of Nigeria into smaller and more numerous states. Because certain Niger Delta peoples have been fixed as minorities in Nigeria, the needs and well-being of Niger Delta communities are not priorities, especially as they are construed as being at odds with national needs and priorities. It is in this context that their status as minorities has had the most devastating implications. The book closes by exploring the various ways these communities have used their minority status to simultaneously challenge and insist upon inclusion within the Nigerian state, asking what might be possible for their future as Nigerian citizens.

Chapter 6 situates John Milton’s major works – Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes – in relation to abiding conflicts over fiscal policy prompted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Milton was actively critical of the Commonwealth’s management of fiscal policy and voiced his fear about the fiscal impact of a restored monarchy. Though fiscal concerns are largely occluded from his poetry, Milton’s depiction of war and its effects continues this critique by dramatizing the disastrous consequences of security imaginaries organized around the violently expansive accumulation of wealth. Milton’s metasecurity dilemma arises in his poetry as a question about how to value people and circumstances correctly, about the relevant criteria to use to orient oneself ethically and politically within catastrophic realities. His poems thus highlight Milton’s deep uncertainty about how to define safety or about what kinds of collective security might be possible in such a disoriented moment.