The violence in Sasun was interpreted differently after investigations by missionaries, by foreign consuls, and by the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The Ottomans relied almost exclusively on a single legitimist report that became the state’s measure of "truth." To retain a monopoly of legitimate narrative, the Ottoman state utilized various forms of censorship – banning newspapers from abroad, forbidding any independent discussion of Sasun in the Ottoman press, preventing peasants from the area from traveling, and eventually banning all foreign journalists. At the same time, news of the massacres spread through word of mouth, and rumors of the Sasun violence increased tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire. When news of the violence reached London through missionary networks in mid-November 1894, it ignited a much larger debate about the British government’s support for the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a support understood by many as complicity. The same missionary networks in the United Kingdom and the United States that had taken up abolitionism in the early nineteenth century now focused their activist energy on the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire.

The interplay between local and global history is where the trials of empire are held. The Ottoman state overturned the autonomously ruled Kurdish Emirates in the mountainous east, bringing large numbers of Kurdish- and Armenian-speakers directly under Ottoman rule. The efforts to divide and conquer these populations created "Armenian" and "Kurdish" questions that have occupied ruling elites since the mid-nineteenth century. The "Armenian question," like many of the "questions" of the nineteenth century – "the Woman question," "the Negro question," or "the Jewish’ question" – related to the rights of those who had long been denied equality. This "question" intensified in a struggle in the Muş highlands between Armenian peasants and their warlord in the late 1880s. As elsewhere in the mountainous regions of the empire, the Ottomans backed local nobles who expressed loyalty. In the plain of Muş, the Ottoman central authorities continued to support the warlord Musa Bey, despite accusations of malfeasance, kidnapping, and murder. For many of the Armenian peasants, the final straw was in 1889 when Musa Bey kidnapped and raped Gülizar, a young daughter of a priest. Local protests spread through migrant networks to Istanbul, and then through the press to readers around the world.

The 1973 Paris Accords provided only a temporary respite from the war. As the war between the Vietnamese continued, antiwar forces focused initially on carrying out the agreement, then on ending US military and financial support for the Thieu regime. The Watergate scandal undermined the final obstacle to ending America’s commitment. The war’s 1975 conclusion brought more relief than excitement.

North Vietnam launched a major offensive in 1972 and President Nixon responded with intensified bombing. The competing antiwar coalitions rallied modest demonstrations. Militant tactics attracted much of the public attention, but represented an approach overwhelmingly condemned by antiwar activists. The broader movement launched a “spring offensive” that appeared more cathartic than influential. College campuses continued as dependable sites of protest, but Congress struggled for efficacy and public opinion remained ambiguous. Individual organizations or focused alliances provided the most effective antiwar activity. Women targeted Congress, religious groups confronted corporations, and resistance continued within the armed forces, but most activists in 1972 tried to elect presidential nominee George McGovern and other officials who would finally end the war. A final spasm of retribution in December preceded the 1973 peace settlement. The Watergate scandal weakened the Nixon presidency and strengthened congressional authority, which, combined with determined grassroots activities, finally observed the war’s end two years later.

This chapter begins the empirical examination of the second political service provided by firms: societal control. I situate this political service within China’s solid waste treatment sector, where the development of waste incineration plants has consistently faced public opposition and protests. Drawing on original data from all 351 incineration plants built or under construction in Chinese cities between 1999 and 2016, as well as records of protests against these plants, I demonstrate a strong relationship between protests and firm ownership in this sector. During the bidding stage for waste treatment contracts, local governments factor in societal control when selecting firms to build and operate these plants. If local governments anticipate employing appeasement strategies toward protesters, private firms are more likely to thrive in a city. Conversely, if governments expect to rely on suppression strategies, state-owned enterprises tend to dominate.

Ostensibly, all British former servicemen received a new wardrobe. In reality, this was reserved for British- and Irish-born veterans and denied to those from Britain’s colonies. This chapter foregrounds a ‘mutiny’ by West Indian RAF personnel in May 1946. British officials, alarmed by a ‘colour problem’ they ascribed to Black men’s excessive sensitivity to racist slurs, worked to repatriate veterans of colour, regardless of their wishes and British status. Repatriated West Indian veterans received just a promissory note. This cash entitlement varied from island to island. Enraged by racialized injustices, West Indian airmen demanded redress, staging a protest as the SS Bergensfjord transported them from Glasgow to Trinidad and Jamaica. This chapter places their demonstration within two larger frames: a wave of transnational veteran militancy in late 1945 and 1946, in which grievances over clothing were interwoven with larger imperial injustices; and a proliferation of ‘double crossings’ after the war, trans-oceanic passages in both directions, as people were removed or elected to move. Many West Indian veterans soon returned to Britain on the Windrush and other vessels.

Gold mines in Kyrgyzstan that are owned and operated by Chinese investors have experienced several problems in recent years, chief among them being labor disputes with local workers. These disputes mark a pattern of dysfunction in one of Kyrgyzstan’s most critical industries. They are further significant for a number of additional reasons. First, they shine a light on the realities of doing business in a controversial sector in a developing country. Second, they demonstrate labor issues from the host state side, specifically the difficulties of finding decent work for Kyrgyz laborers, and how certain industries may thereby engage in predatory practices. Third, they show the ineffectiveness of government intervention. This case study will expose readers to the causes of the problem and encourage them to critically assess the responses of various stakeholders to the disputes and the extent to which different fields and concepts of governance may be applicable in addressing the problems. These fields and concepts range from corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social and governance (ESG) to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the “Green Silk Road.”

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

This chapter is about the perspectives and experiences that female sex workers in China share across tiers of prostitution. The daily lives of low-tier sex workers, hostesses, and second wives in China differ from each other in important ways. Yet despite relatively fixed boundaries between tiers of prostitution, these women do not exist in unrelated, independent silos. After all, their source of income comes from the same activity: exchanging sex for money or other material goods. The chapter first highlights how movement across tiers of sex work is limited, and how low-tier sex workers and hostesses express a preference for the work conditions in their own tier, rather than voice a desire to move up in the pecking order. It then examines narratives that these women have in common across all three tiers. Lastly, it discusses how sex workers who cross paths with grassroots organizations develop a shared consciousness of their membership in a global community of sex work civil society, and appropriate its language and symbols in their own lives.

This chapter concludes the book offering a final analysis of the story of the continuing Kazakh Spring.

This chapter provides an overview of the innovative protesting techniques of the Kazakh Spring and the Oyan, Qazaqstan movement. The interplay between the repressive law-enforcement agencies and the creative protesting techniques and narratives protestors had to find is at the heart of this chapter. I argue that the evolution of the protestors’ movements led to slow but consistent adaptation on the part of the police and secret police, and all those involved in the physical and emotional harassment of the protestors. Through interviews, I focus on how the body of the protestor and the public square become the two prime spaces for aggressive coercion and resistance. This pushes protestors to stage bodiless performances with anonymous posters and anonymous online activism, on the one hand. And on the other hand, it pushes law-enforcement officers to find aggravated techniques of torture. They came up with the kettling strategy, whereby protestors are trapped for hours in the heat or severe cold without access to basic amenities, water, food, or shelter. Other techniques of torture included kidnapping, intimidation, and even sexual violence.

In January 2022, mass protests spread quickly across the whole of Kazakhstan, becoming the largest mass mobilization in the country’s modern history. Prior to these events, Kazakhstan was considered a stable authoritarian regime: President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s thirty-year rule established a system of patronal networks, institutionalized corruption, and authoritarianism that crushed any form of dissent and opposition. What, then, led to this unprecedented mass mobilization, which unified the country’s fourteen regions and three major cities in protest against the regime? This chapter analyses the mass protests through the framework of regime–society relations, arguing that a key failure of the regime built by Nazarbayev is its inability to reconcile the regime’s neoliberal prosperity rhetoric with citizens’ calls for a welfare state. It then explores how a tradition of protests has been developing since 2011 and addresses the structural components of regime (in)stability and how they contributed to violence in the protests.