This chapter examines the intersection of militarism, climate change, and Islamic environmental ethics from a transnational perspective, arguing that the military-industrial complex is a structurally overlooked but significant contributor to global ecological degradation. It critiques the exemption of military emissions from international climate protocols and highlights the disproportionate environmental burdens placed on Muslim-majority countries. Drawing on Quranic principles such as khalīfah (trusteeship), mīzān (balance), and ‘adl (justice), the chapter presents a theological framework that calls for demilitarization and ecological justice. Through case studies from Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan, as well as analysis of Islamic legal tools, eco-fatwas, grassroots movements, and green finance instruments, the chapter outlines a holistic response rooted in Islamic teachings. It concludes by advocating for a reconceptualization of national security and climate action that centers spiritual responsibility, ecological stewardship, and transnational solidarity.

Chapter 5 compares Wilhelmine Germany with Edwardian England and arrives at an unconventional conclusion about their relative stability. There is a scholarly tradition of viewing the Second Reich, particularly after the fall of Bismarck and the political ascension of King Wilhelm II, as so ridden with internal contradictions that it was in near-permanent crisis. More recently, scholars have argued that Germany was in fact democratizing, suggesting again that this major historical case of competitive authoritarianism was volatile. I find instead that the balance of evidence indicates that Imperial Germany is a good case of institutionalized competitive authoritarianism, and that it was Edwardian England rather than Wilhelmine Germany where the most serious threat of regime change existed. I contest two widely held misconceptions: (1) that the UK had transitioned to democracy significantly before the outbreak of WWI and (2) that the landed elite acquiesced in this transition. I argue instead that the UK was not only a prototypical competitive oligarchy before WWI but also that it was in a constitutional crisis and close to civil war.

According to Dazai Shundai, regulations governing people’s dress and their ceremonial guards and retinues are a way to visibly display distinctions in status, but appropriate systems for these are lacking in Tokugawa Japan. The military is a necessary complement to the civil in governing, but the samurai of Tokugawa Japan, who have lived in cities for several generations while receiving hereditary stipends, have lost the qualities of true warriors and would be of little use in an actual battle. To remedy this, samurai should be required to train in the martial arts.

This chapter studies the significance of King Arthur’s status as a military fighter and as a leader of warriors in both medieval and modern literary contexts. First exploring the militarist and imperialist version of King Arthur that was appropriated and expanded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the essay shows how aggressive Arthurian militarism was consistently haunted by anti-imperialist critique, particularly within late medieval romances of the Old French tradition (such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and late medieval English work (particularly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). After analysing the ambivalence of Arthurian militarism within Malory, the essay shows the modern deployment of Arthurian militarism by figures such as Spenser and Tennyson. The essay closes with comparison of ghostly, late medieval warnings about the ill fruits of militarism in the Awntyrs off Arthure with Kazuo Ishiguro’s contemporary portrait of the endemic nature of violence in the Britain shaped by Arthurian militarist culture.

The relationship between states and their militaries has long been a subject of social enquiry. Most nation-states have their origins in war, formed and reformed by external conflict and civil wars. Yet the military aspects of state power are intimately tied to all other aspects of state power in relation to its industrial, entrepreneurial and global dimensions. Having discussed the ways in which militaries shape and constrain transition pathways through innovation and their everyday conduct as well as the exercise of violence and war, the chapter explores potential to transform the military state arguing that at the heart of transforming the military state is the need to rethink security, possibly along the lines of ecological security. In conjunction with efforts to embed more ecological thinking in relation to security, a prerequisite for such a shift is a revisioning of the goal and purpose of the economy as proposed in Chapter 4, at least in richer countries in the first instance.

The introduction presents the main arguments that will be developed in the book and how letters and petitions that were found in the military archive are the basis from which to argue that the military was an institution in the first half of the nineteenth century. The nearly one thousand case studies provide the information that makes it possible to understand the Peruvian armed forces. This chapter also covers the historiographical debate by discussing the notion of caudillos and how although most of the new republics have been seen as controlled by armed men on horseback, the military can be described as an insitution that while having a colonial origin, transformed throughout the wars of independence. The way in which those who became members of the armed forces is analyzed in detail showing that a social system of protection for those who were part of it developed from the colonial systems Comparisons are made with the cases of the United States, France, Spain and the rest of Latin America. This section ends with a description of the book’s structure and a description of each chapter.

The Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsula are neighbouring regions, with histories of similarities and contrasts. Currently inhabited by a population of about 123 million in an area slightly bigger than Germany, Japan has been relatively isolated throughout much of the last two millennia. In the late nineteenth century, Japan reinvented itself from a land on the margins of the Sinitic cultural zone to a world power. In contrast, Korea – a landmass a little larger than Great Britain and inhabited by about 78 million people – was an active participant in the China-centred world order during much of its 2,300 year-history before losing sovereignty to Imperial Japan in 1910. (See Map 13.)

Sub-Saharan Africa was on the threshold of a new and violent era in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ensuing four centuries would see innovative forms of military organisation, novel cultures of militarism underpinning such systems, and new wars, as well as new ways of fighting them. There were often different factors at work in different regions; the presence of external drivers was a key distinction between Atlantic Africa and the rest of the continent, for instance. However, warfare across early modern Africa had much in common, in terms of the aim to control factor endowments, to maximise population, and to construct enduring ideological systems, whether territorially or culturally defined. In some ways – certainly in terms of the underlying trends and broad contours of Africa’s military history – the existence or absence of external intrusion is a distraction, however significant it was in particular places at particular times. The outcome of the processes in motion between c. 1450 and c. 1850 was an expansion in military scale, the professionalisation of soldiery, the adoption of new weaponry, and the militarisation of the polity – whether ‘state-based’ or otherwise. The militarisation of African polities and societies was an ongoing process between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, a period which in many ways witnessed the laying of the foundations of modern African political systems; this would culminate in a veritable military revolution in the nineteenth century, a transformation in the organisation and culture of violence, without which Europe’s later partition of the continent cannot properly be understood.

Chapter III delves into the discursive mechanisms through which former Israeli conscripts in this study understood, justified and/or distanced themselves from the violent regime in which they serve(d) – relating this to the broader context of ‘moralised militarism’ so frequently attributed to the Israeli military. Through analysis of the speech acts, moralisations and emotive articulations by former and current soldiers, I argue that traits of emotional expression, reflection and critique – far from being anomalies of militarised masculinity in this context – are central to its legitimation and idealisation, enabling the soldier, and society more broadly, to retain their sense of humanity amidst enduring violence. Rather than performances of stoicism and emotional control with which ‘traditional’ forms of militarised masculinity are normatively associated, a more philosophical, emotive, and cerebral approach to violence appears to be celebrated and encouraged within Israeli militarism – consolidating the supposed relation between militarism, masculinity, and moralism in the settler-colonial state.

Chapter I explores traditionally ‘non-hegemonic’ attributes as inherent to militarised masculinities in contemporary Israel, examining embodied compliance and submission to a higher order as a normalised means of ascending the ‘hierarchy of bodies’ that bolsters and undergirds the Zionist project from its outset. Exploring basic training, punishments, military hierarchy, friendship, camaraderie and death, I argue that the conscious performance of embodied submission (with enthusiastic consent) is as much valued within conscripted military masculinities as militarised domination in this context. Indeed, I suggest that the conscripted combat soldier – the archetypal national and masculine hero – must be both visibly dominant over the indigenous Palestinian ‘Other’, while simultaneously malleable and submissive to the goals of the Israeli state. As such, I explore both polarities of domination and submission as demanded within the parameters of idealised military masculinity – illustrating the gendered tensions that punctuate normative binaries in this militarised setting.

Chapters V explores the sexual politics of Israel’s colonial regime, serving to undo the all-too-common misconception that sexual violence is “extremely limited” in this context. Emphasising the obfuscation of dynamics of race and coloniality, I start with exploration of hegemonic analyses of conflict-related sexual violence, and the related depiction of Israeli militarism as devoid of sexual violence. I then analyse the eroticisation of the Israeli military and colonial ‘conquest’, and the fetishization of the bodies that undertake it – entangling colonial domination with notions and physiological sensations of erotic pleasure. Finally, I discuss the policing of militarised hierarchies through the logic of sexual violence, trickling from those ‘on top’ to inferior soldiers – by age, gender, and class – to the occupied Palestinian body. I thus argue that sexualised violence pervades the entire structure of Israeli settler colonialism, fusing military activity and colonisation with hetero-masculinised notions of domination, virility, pleasure, and control.