A particularly rich literature has flourished around the history of collective violence during the ‘revolutionary century’, and the following titles represent only a small selection. Relevant works by Charles Tilly include ‘How Protest Modernized in France, 1845–1855’, in Aydelotte, W. C. (ed.), The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 192–255; The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and ‘Collective Violence in European Perspective’, in Gurr, Ted Robert (ed.), Violence in America, 3rd edn (Newberry Park: Sage, 1989), pp. 62–100. An incisive treatment of Tilly’s ‘intellectual evolution’ on collective violence is Hanagan, Michael, ‘Charles Tilly and Violent France’, French Historical Studies 33.2 (2010), 283–97; a critique of his treatment of the Revolution is by William Sewell, ‘Collective Violence and Collective Loyalties in France: Why the French Revolution Made a Difference’, Politics & Society 18 (1990), 527–52.

On crowd violence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, see Farge, Arlette, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Carol Shelton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Lucas, Colin, ‘The Crowd and Politics from Ancien Régime to Revolution in France’, Journal of Modern History 60.3 (1988), 421–57; Beik, William, ‘The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution’, Past & Present 197 (2007), 75–110; and Rudé, George ’s classic The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), whose materialist arguments were further developed in The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964) and Ideology and Popular Protest (New York: Pantheon, 1980), esp. chapters 3–4. More theoretically, see the useful overviews by Holton, Robert, ‘The Crowd in History: Some Problems of Theory and Method’, Social History 3.2 (1978), 219–33, and, on the culturalist interpretations, Desan, Suzanne, ‘Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of Thompson, E. P. and Davis’, Natalie, in Hunt, Lynn (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 47–71. On the continuity of religious violence from ancien régime to the nineteenth century, see Ford, Caroline, ‘Violence and the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France’, French Historical Studies 21.1 (1998), 101–12.

On the Revolution of 1789–99, two important reassessments of revolutionary violence and the relative peacefulness of Parisian crowds are, respectively, Martin, Jean-Clément, Violence et Révolution: essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006) and Alpaugh, Micah, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The most thorough analysis of the September Massacres remains Caron, Pierre, Les massacres de septembre (Paris: Maison du Livre Français, 1935), but see also Bluche, Frédéric, Septembre 1792: logiques d’un massacre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1986) and, more recently, Simien, Côme, Les massacres de septembre 1792 à Lyon (Lyons: Éditions Aléas, 2011) and Sutherland, D. M. G., ‘Justice and Murder: Massacres in the Provinces, Versailles, Meaux and Reims in 1792’, Past & Present 222 (2014), 129–62. Factional violence in the South is explored in Lucas, Colin, ‘Themes in Southern Violence after 9 Thermidor’, in Lewis, Gwynne and Lucas, Colin (eds.), Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 152–94; Clay, Stephen, ‘Vengeance, Justice and the Reactions in the Revolutionary Midi’, French History 23.1 (2009), 22–46; and Sutherland, D. M. G., Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Recent useful surveys on collective violence between 1789 and 1799 can be found in McPhee, Peter (ed.), A Companion to the French Revolution (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Andress, David (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Violent rural protest, including subsistence riots, is treated extensively in Tilly, Louise, ‘The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2.1 (1971), 23–57; Bercé, Yves-Marie, Croquants et nu-pieds: les soulèvements paysans en France du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1974); Nicolas, Jean (ed.), Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, XVI–XIXe siècles. Actes du colloque de Paris 24–26 mai 1984 (Paris: Maloine, 1985); and Bourguinat, Nicolas, Les grains du désordre: l’État face aux violences frumentaires dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions ÉHÉSS, 2002). Rural insurrections during the French Revolution have meanwhile been examined by Lefebvre, Georges, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (New York: NLB, 1973); Markoff, John, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); and Ado, Anatolï, Paysans en révolution: terre, pouvoir et jacquerie 1789–1794 (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1996).

On the insurrectionary crowd in later revolutions, see, chronologically, Traugott, Mark, The Insurgent Barricade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Merriman, John, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815–1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Pilbeam, Pamela, ‘Popular Violence in Provincial France after the 1830 Revolution’, English Historical Review (1976), 278–97; Merriman, John (ed.), 1830 in France (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975); McPhee, Peter, The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Margadant, Ted, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Bouton, Cynthia, Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture: Buzançais, 1847–2008 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

Finally, close interpretations of popular massacres across the century are numerous, including (amongst many others) Valin, Claudy, Autopsie d’un massacre: les journées des 21 et 22 mars 1793 à La Rochelle (Saint-Jean-d’Angély: Éditions Bordessoules, 1992); Moulinas, René, Les massacres de la glacière: enquête sur un crime impuni, Avignon 16–17 octobre 1791 (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 2003); and Corbin, Alain, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Works such as Black, Jeremy’s Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) clearly show how cartography has helped shape modernity. But while Black’s study considers war, nationalism and geo-politics, the connection between geography and genocide is absent. There are some studies which make explicit links between aspects of the Holocaust and geography. Notable is van Pelt, Robert Jan and Dwork, Deborah ’s Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), a highly innovative exploration of the location of the Nazi death camp par excellence at a historic European crossroads, replete with maps illustrating how changing borders over time were a factor in determining the fate of millions. Excellent maps are also assets in other Holocaust or Holocaust-related studies, including Brandon, Ray and Lower’s, Wendy The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) and Snyder’s, Timothy Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010), but minus considerations of how the disciplinary development of geography per se informed an increasingly toxic Ratzelian geopolitics.

However, there has been keen interest in recent studies of the impact of imperial collapse on Europe’s borderlands and its people. Bartov, Omer and Weitz, Eric D. (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) exemplifies the contemporary scholarship in the field, including a growing awareness of how and where genocide became a key vector of postimperial nation-building. That this also included Soviet ‘nation-building’ is acutely developed in Martin, Terry, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 813–61. Martin’s study is also exemplary in its situating of Soviet ethnic cleansing within a borderlands landscape which needs to be read as a whole, as well as disaggregated into discrete zones of violence.

While the broad, systemic picture of genocide in its relationships to historical time and geographical space is yet to be fully explored, there have been suggestive regional studies including of the Macedonia-Thrace arena. Henry, R. Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1951) was a notable forerunner in assessing how competing, mythic and increasingly belligerent nationalist claims on territory were dependent on the creation of allegedly accurate, supporting ethnographic maps. More recently the subject has been brilliantly reconsidered in Yosmaoglu, Ipek, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1906 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), not least in demonstrating the connecting threads between cartography and censuses and an ensuing mass violence.

Finally, for further, recent but significant intervention cross-relating genocide, the specific political geography of Macedonia-Thrace and modernity, see Segal, Raz, ‘The Modern State: The Question of Genocide and Holocaust Scholarship’,  Journal of Genocide Research 20.1 (2018), 108–33, and Levene, Mark, ‘“The Bulgarians Were the Worst!”: Reconsidering the Holocaust in Salonika within a Regional History of Mass Violence’, in Antoniou, Giorgos and Dirk Moses, A. (eds.), The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 36–57.

There are not very many general overviews of concentration camps. The two most interesting methodologically are Greiner, Bettina and Kramer, Alan (eds.), Welt der Lager: Zur ‘Erfolgsgeschichte’ einer Institution (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013) and Jahr, Christoph and Thiel, Jens (eds.), Lager vor Auschwitz: Gewalt und Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Metropol, 2013), although the older survey by Kaminski, Andrzej J., Konzentrationslager 1896 bis heute: Geschichte, Funktion, Typologie (Munich: Piper, 1990 [1982]) remains well worth consulting. More like a compendium is Kotek, Joël and Rigoulot, Pierre, Le siècle des camps: détention, concentration, extermination: cent ans de mal radical (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2000). Two excellent short accounts are offered by Richard Overy, ‘The Concentration Camp: An International Perspective’, Eurozine (2011), online at www.eurozine.com/articles/2011–08-25-overy-en.html, and Mühlhahn, Klaus, ‘The Concentration Camp in Global Historical Perspective’, History Compass 8.6 (2010), 543–61. Useful comparative approaches can be found in Rodrigo, Javier, ‘Exploitation, Fascist Violence and Social Cleansing: A Study of Franco’s Concentration Camps from a Comparative Perspective’, European Review of History 19.4 (2012), 553–73, which contains many insightful remarks about camps in general; Hyslop, Jonathan, ‘The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907’, South African Historical Journal 63.2 (2011), 251–76; Smith, Iain and Stucki, Andreas, ‘The Development of Concentration Camps’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39.3 (2011), 417–37; and Kreienbaum, Jonas, ‘Ein trauriges Fiasko’: Koloniale Konzentrationslager im südlichen Afrika 1900–1908 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2015), which succinctly discusses the colonial camps’ similarities to and differences from the Nazi camps. Also worth consulting are Scharnagl, Hermann, Kurze Geschichte der Konzentrationslager (Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2004); Wieviorka, Annette, ‘L’expression “camp de concentration” au 20e siècle’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 54 (1997), 4–12; and Wippermann, Wolfgang, Konzentrationslager: Geschichte, Nachgeschichte, Gedenken (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1999). A recent synthesis is Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). A related research project is the University of Leicester’s Convict Voyages, which talks of ‘The Carceral Archipelago’, online at http://convictvoyages.org/.

On the first colonial camps, apart from the works mentioned above, see also Elizabeth Van Heyningen’s work, which provides a needed corrective to Afrikaner mythologies, but perhaps giving too much credence to British good intentions. See especially: ‘“Costly Mythologies”: The Concentration Camps of the South African War in Afrikaner Historiography’, Journal of Southern African Studies 34.3 (2008), 495–513; ‘The Concentration Camps of the South African (Anglo-Boer) War, 1900–1902’, History Compass 7.1 (2009), 22–43; and The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2013). See also Pretorius, Fransjohan, ‘The White Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Debate without End’, Historia 55.2 (2010), 34–49. On the Hereros, see the essays in Zimmerer, Jürgen and Zeller, Joachim (eds.), Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2003) and Kreienbaum, Jonas, ‘“Vernichtungslager” in Deutsch-Südwestafrika? Zur Funktion der Konzentrationslager im Herero- und Namakrieg (1904–1908)’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 58.12 (2010), 1014–26.

The literature on the Nazi camps is mountainous. The essential starting point is now Wachsmann, Nikolaus, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little, Brown, 2015), but other examples of innovative recent work include: Buggeln, Marc, Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Wünschmann, Kim, Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Dillon, Christopher, Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Knoch, Habbo and Rahe, Thomas (eds.), Bergen-Belsen: Neue Forschungen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014); and Caplan, Jane and Wachsmann, Nikolaus (eds.), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (London: Routledge, 2010).

Likewise, the literature on the Gulag is now huge and far more sophisticated than it was at the turn of the century. Works which question a simple notion of a ‘Gulag archipelago’ include: Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Steven, A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Paul, R. Gregory and Lazarev, Valery (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Washington, DC: Hoover Institution, 2003); Ivanova, Galina Mikhailovna, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System (London: Routledge, 2015); Khlevniuk, Oleg V., The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Viola, Lynne, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Useful Nazi–Soviet comparisons include Armanski, Gerhard, Maschinen des Terrors: Das Lager (KZ und GULAG) in der Moderne (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1993) and Dahlmann, Dittmar and Hirschfeld, Gerhard (eds.), Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation: Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933–1945 (Essen: Klartext, 1999).

On camps in Franco’s Spain see: Gonzalo, Fernando Mendiola, ‘Forced Labor, Public Policies, and Business Strategies during Franco’s Dictatorship: An Interim Report’, Enterprise and Society 14.1 (2013), 182–213; Javier Rodrigo’s article mentioned above and his chapter in Greiner and Kramer (eds.), Welt der Lager; Molinero, Carme et al. (eds.), Una imensa prisión: los campos de concentración y prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2003), 224–44; and the beautifully written book by Graham, Helen, The War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). On fascist Italy, see Pont, Adriano Dal, I Lager di Mussolini: l’altra faccia del confine nei documenti della polizia fascista (Milan: La Pietra, 1975); Ebner, Michael R., Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Reale, Luigi, Mussolini’s Concentration Camps for Civilians: An Insight into the Nature of Fascist Racism (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011).

On concentration camps in communist regimes see, among many others: Saunders, Kate, Eighteen Layers of Hell: Stories from the Chinese Gulag (London: Cassell, 1996); Mühlhahn, Klaus, ‘The Dark Side of Globalization: The Concentration Camps in Republican China in Global Perspective’, World History Connected 6.1 (2009), 543–61; Chol-hwan, Kang and Rigoulot, Pierre, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag (Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001); Ierunca, Virgil, Fenomenul Piteşti (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2013); and, although contentious, the relevant sections in Courtois, Stéphane et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Until the 1990s, because of restricted access to the Party archives and other essential primary sources, there had been no in-depth analysis that had scrutinised violence in revolutionary China. Scholars studying the history of the PRC, who relied on the published works, could do little more than provide a broad view that, to a large extent, echoed the CCP’s official historiography. This coincided with the decade leading up to as well as after Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, when a group of Westerners, including some China specialists, took an increasingly sympathetic view of the PRC. They often credited the CCP with establishing a stable government after decades of war and political turmoil. This began as a counter-trend that quickly gained momentum in the wake of the Vietnam War. This positive image of the Chinese communist revolution and the achievements in the PRC was a useful weapon in their criticism aimed against America’s military aggression in South-East Asia. After the death of Mao, however, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the stories of persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution years (1966–76) began to challenge this earlier positive image. The background for this was the 1981 Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s (CPCC) ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party’ that divided the history of the PRC into pre- and post-1957. In this modified version of Chinese historiography, the years before 1957 were depicted as the ‘Golden Years’ of the PRC, during which the CCP and the PRC government had successfully accomplished peaceful Land Reform and embarked on the First Five-Year Plan that foreshowed the rapid and non-violent agricultural collectivisation from 1955 to 1956. Western as well as Chinese scholarship quickly adopted the CPCC’s 1957 division. This was further supported by an increasing number of autobiographical and fictional texts on the Cultural Revolution that were published in and outside of China. They reinforced the official view that the Cultural Revolution was the disastrous period of the PRC history and that the years before it were ‘Golden Years’.

This position began to change in 1989 when the news of armed violence against unarmed students on Tiananmen Square shocked the world. Gradually, in the 1990s, a bleaker picture of the pre-1957 PRC history began to appear. An increasing number of Chinese as well as Western scholars began to challenge the image of the pre-1957 ‘Golden Years’. In the 1990s, in part triggered by similar developments in the former Soviet Union and its east European ex-satellites, changes took place in the PRC archives. The 1990 new archival regulation (revised in May 1999) theoretically made documents more than thirty years old available for public access. In practice, however, a great number of documents were and still are classified as ‘unsuitable’ for public access and remain as ‘closed’ files. After autumn 2012, greater restrictions were introduced by the State Archives Administration of China (SAAC), which made it difficult for researchers to read documents from the period of 1949 to 1979. The short window of openness between the 1990s and 2012, however, allowed Chinese as well as Western scholars in the humanities and social sciences access to a great mass of declassified original Party and other sources on the PRC’s first three decades. This newly unearthed information, often in conjunction with newly available documentary materials in other countries, transformed the ability to study, understand and explain the social, economic and political history of the PRC under Mao. This resulted in a far more critical view of the Chinese communist revolution and the early PRC history. In this reappraisal, we learn that coercion and violence existed throughout the Mao era from the early PRC to the end of the Cultural Revolution. Edward Friedman, Pickowicz, Paul G and Mark, Selden’s Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), for example, showed that during and after the Great Leap Famine (1958–62), intra- and inter-village clashes erupted and spilled over into violence. This continued into the Cultural Revolution, when violence peaked throughout the countryside. At the same time, Kuisong, Yang ’s ‘Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries’, China Quarterly 193 (2008), 104–20, allowed readers in English to see how violence was an essential tool used by the CCP regime to maintain its fragile power in the early 1950s after the communist Liberation. Frank Dikötter’s major history of the Great Leap Famine, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), argued that violence was the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward. There was widespread violence on the local level throughout the famine period. The argument presented by Dikötter was further reinforced by Zhou Xun’s companion volumes. Using first-hand oral interviews with survivors as well as previously unseen Party archival documents, Xun’s, Zhou Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine: An Oral History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) and The Great Famine of China, 1958–62: A Documentary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) allowed readers to see for themselves that the sheer extremity of violence that took place during the Great Leap Forward famine was beyond doubt.

The Indonesian anti-communist killings in 1965–6 have until recently attracted little scholarly attention within Indonesia. The New Order regime did what it could to block research. Even today, two decades after street protests overthrew the New Order in 1998, studies on their how and why remain relatively scarce. Discussion of them has also hardly penetrated the world of genocide studies. Yet over the years committed scholars have still built up a body of research. A comprehensive bibliographical guide is in John Roosa, ‘Bibliography on the Events of 1965–66 in Indonesia’ (Indonesian Institute of Social History, 2009), www.sejarahsosial.org/2009/09/11/bibliography-on-the-events-of-1965–66-in-Indonesia/. A focused bibliographical overview is in McGregor, Katharine E., ‘The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966’, in Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence (SciencePo, 2009).

Behaviourist thinking had considerable influence on early thinking about the massacres; see overview in Horowitz, Donald L., The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Some well-known scholars of Indonesia like Clifford Geertz and Anthony Reid used behaviourist language in the 1960s and 1970s when alluding to the Indonesian killings, and as late as 2003 one historian still described them as a ‘vast popular irruption’; Friend, Theodore, Indonesian Destinies (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 99). However, book-length work in this vein has tended to come from journalists, notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning John Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval. It has also been prominent in Indonesian accounts that remain close to the army’s narrative of the period; Notosusanto, Nugroho and Saleh, Ismail, The Coup Attempt of the ‘September 30 Movement’ in Indonesia (Jakarta: Pembimbing, 1968).

Most scholarly work on the episode has, by contrast, been consciously political. The focus of publications that have introduced the subject to the genocide studies community has been on the consequences of military intervention, justified in the West by Cold War considerations, in the politics of a highly mobilised, poor agrarian Southeast Asian society. See the following works by Robert Cribb: Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings: Studies from Java and Bali (Clayton: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990); ‘Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–66’, Journal of Genocide Research 3.2 (2001), 219–39; ‘Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966’, Asian Survey 42.4 (2002), 550–63; ‘Massacres, The Indonesian’, in Totten, Samuel and Parsons, William S. (eds.), Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 235–62. See also McGregor, ‘The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966.’

The political intrigues in Jakarta on the night of 1 October 1965 have been of central interest. What links did the ‘30 September Movement’ have with the PKI, the military, Sukarno, or even Suharto? On this topic, refer to military historian Crouch, Harold, The Army and Politics in Indonesia, rev. edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Roosa, John ’s Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) critically and absorbingly discusses all previous work on the episode before coming up with his own conclusions. This will remain definitive for some time to come. The effect of recent research has been to tighten the net around the military (Kammen and McGregor, eds., The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–1968 ; Melvin, Jess, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (London: Routledge, 2018); Robinson, Geoffrey B., The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Essential background is the military history of Sundhaussen, Ulf, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics, 1945–1967 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1982).

A good older study on the PKI, at the centre of the contention, has recently been reissued, Mortimer, Rex ’s Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959–1965 (Singapore: Equinox, 2006 [1974]). Links between political parties and underlying religious persuasions are expertly explored by Ricklefs, M. C., Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present (Singapore: NUS, 2012). The complicity of the United States government is described in Simpson, Bradley, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

One of the reasons (beyond the behaviourist instinct) that early work on the massacres emphasised societal dynamics was that they showed so much regional variation in timing and extent. The particular savagery in the countryside of East Java, for example, was seen to indicate Javanese cultural motives. A growing number of regional studies have focused precisely on questions of the state–society interface that provides the backdrop for the killings. Among the best of these is still Robinson, Geoffrey, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Others have discussed the impact of the violence on women (Wieringa, Saskia E., Sexual Politics in Indonesia (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)); on literature (Foulcher, Keith, Social Commitment in Literature and the Arts: The Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s Culture’, 1950–1965 (Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1986)); and on film (Sen, Krishna, Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order (London: Zed Books, 1994)).

Contemporary awareness of the 1965 massacres received a boost within Indonesia and abroad from two Joshua Oppenheimer films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), and by the International People’s Tribunal 1965 held in The Hague in 2015 (‘1965, Today: Living with the Indonesian Massacres’, special edition of Journal of Genocide Research 19.4 (2017)).

The Cold War holds a unique place in the history of violence. Notably, a large body of Cold War literature concentrates on imaginary violence (the threat and fear of violence), especially regarding thermonuclear destruction. Among the prominent exemplars are Kaldor’s, Mary The Imaginary War: Understanding the East–West Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990) and Gaddis, John Lewis ’s The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For Gaddis, the era’s imaginary violence is equal in meaning to the extraordinary stretch of peace that Western and other industrialised nations enjoyed during the Cold War.

Different renderings of the place of violence in Cold War history also exist. These typically result from broad comparative or global historical views of the Cold War that consider the different ways in which violence was manifested across territories, especially between post-1945 Europe and the postcolonial world. LaFeber’s, Walter ‘An End to Which Cold War?’, in Hogan, Michael J. (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13–20, clarifies that Cold War conflicts resulted in over 40 million human casualties across places. The era’s large-scale violence erupted especially in places that experienced Cold War confrontation as part of decolonisation. Accordingly, the theme of Cold War violence is discussed widely in studies on the global conflict that was waged in the decolonising world. Notable in this regard is Westad, Odd Arne ’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which brings to the centre of Cold War historical narratives the history of Third World revolutions, which typically involved civil war crises.

The view of the Cold War in terms of a history of violence is present in several area studies. In Latin American studies, Grandin’s, Greg The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) is useful for discerning the particular character of political violence that the region experienced – both as a continuation of colonial violence and as a new form of political terror that was harbouring novel ideological dispositions. Burke, Kyle ’s Revolutionaries for the Right: Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) provides a history of counterinsurgency warfare during the Cold War in a global context. In addition, the growing scholarship on Asia’s Cold War experience has consistently foregrounded the violent aspects of global confrontations in the region. Kwon’s, Heonik The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Masuda’s, Hajimu Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Post-War World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) are some recent examples.

Notably, a large body of work on the Korean and Vietnam wars can be considered part of Cold War violence studies. Bruce Cuming’s investigation of the 1947–9 counterinsurgency violence in Korea in The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) is a classic example. An important investigation of a systemic failure regarding the protection of civilians by US forces in the Korean conflict would be Henry, Charles J., Mendoza, Martha and Choe, Sang-hun ’s The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Henry Holt, 2001). Kim’s, Taewoo ‘Limited War, Unlimited Targets: U.S. Air Force Bombing of North Korea during the Korean War, 1950–1953’, Critical Asian Studies 44 (2012), 467–92, provides a useful introduction to the violence of aerial bombing in North Korea, the legacies of which continue to reverberate today in the ongoing US–North Korean stand-off. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, edited by Tanaka, Yuki and Young, Marilyn B. (New York: New Press, 2010), investigates Cold War era aerial violence in a broader historical context inclusive of the experience of the Second World War. Kwon’s, Heonik After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) delves into both the reality and the aftermath of intimate violence that was committed against civilians during the Vietnam War by South Vietnam’s key allies. Ca’s, Nha Mourning Headband for Hue: An Account of the Battle for Hue, 1968, which was beautifully translated by Olga Dror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), is an excellent yet painful testimony to the Vietnam War’s intimate violence, which was committed in South Vietnam by communist forces.

New and innovative studies are now exploring other forms of Cold War violence, which have been hitherto understudied. Monica Kim analyses highly intimate violence, both physical and psychological, in relation to the idea of ‘brainwashing’, which was manifested in the interrogative acts against the communist prisoners of war during the Korea conflict, in The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Polymeris Voglis explores similar issues in the context of the Greek Civil War in his Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002). Martini, Edwin A. ’s Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) explores the Vietnam War’s violence against the environment, focusing on the widespread use of highly toxic herbicides as part of counterinsurgency warfare. This form of violence left enduring human disabilities on combatants, civilians and even those born after the war. These aspects of the Cold War’s ‘war against nature’ are investigated in The Environmental Histories of the Cold War, edited by McNeill, J. R. and Unger, Corinna R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Another notable example in this research genre is anthropologist Krisna Uk’s informative study of how the Jorai people in the border region between Vietnam and Cambodia relate to the deadly remains of the Vietnam War, including unexploded bombs and mines that abound in their highland forest environment, in Salvage: Cultural Resilience among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

As this chapter makes clear, the historiography specifically on quotidian violence as perpetrated by non-state actors in the French empire is not extensive. The best sources on such violence remain testimonies and reports written by travellers, journalists and officials in both published volumes and archival collections. Among the most influential contemporary published non-fiction accounts are Césaire, Aimé, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955); Challaye, Félicien, Un livre noir du colonialisme: ‘Souvenirs sur la colonisation’ (Paris: Les Nuits Rouges, 2003); Drevet, Camille, Les Annamites chex eux (Paris: Imprimerie de la Société Nouvelle d’Éditions Franco-Slaves, 1928); Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Gide, André, Voyage au Congo (Paris: Gallimard, 1927); Hardy, Georges, Nos grands problèmes coloniaux (Paris: A. Colin, 1929); Londres, Albert, Terre d’ébène (Paris: Albin Michel, 1928); Werth, Léon, Cochinchine (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 2005); Viollis, Andrée, Indochine S.O.S. (Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1949).

Despite the dearth of work directly on quotidian violence by non-state actors, there is a rich collection of books that deal with administrative responses to various aspects of violence in the French Empire. A very select list would include Cohen, William, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); Herbst, Jeffrey, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Phyllis, M. Martin, ‘The Violence of Empire’, in Birmingham, David and Martin, Phyllis (eds.), History of Central Africa, vol. ii (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 1–26; the essays collected in Thomas, Martin (ed.), The French Colonial Mind, vol. ii (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); and the collection introduced by Kalman, Samuel in ‘Colonial Violence’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 36.2 (2010), 1–6.

The shifting ideas regarding colonial rule, especially the rise of a kind of anti-colonialism and colonial ‘humanism’, has been a subject explored by Bondi, Jean-Pierre, Les anticolonialistes (1881–1962) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992); Conklin, Alice, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1890–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Girardet, Raoul, L’idée colonial en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972); Liauzu, Claude, L’histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: A. Colin, 2007); Thomas, Martin, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: University of Manchester, 2005); Wilder, Gary, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’s engagement with colonial questions, see Irvine, William, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 1898–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) and Claveau, Cylvie, Une sélection universaliste de l’altérité: l’autre à la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du citoyen en France 1920–1940 (Sarrebrucken: Presses Universitaires Européennes, 2010).

On shifting norms regarding the treatment of colonial subjects in internationalist circles, see Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Daughton, J. P., ‘Behind the Imperial Curtain: International Humanitarian Efforts and the Critique of French Colonialism in the Interwar Years’, French Historical Studies 34.3 (2011), 503–28; Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Finally, comparisons between French colonial relations with Indigenous populations and the dynamics of Jim Crow America can be contemplated by looking at Allen, James (ed.), Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000); Goldsby, Jacqueline, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Litwack, Leon F., Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Vann Woodward, C., The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

Luxuriantly documented episodes of lawlessness and violence have never been scarce in the historiography of Latin America. But only since the 1990s has violence achieved its current status as a distinctive category of systematic research, a move that coincided with the rise in the study of Latin American state formation. Both themes have inspired a sizable corpus of works that frequently overlap.

Studies explicitly linking state formation and violence (variously defined) include Miguel Centeno, Angel, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); López-Alves, Fernando, State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Holden, Robert H., Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Two collections of essays stand out: Garavaglia, Juan et al. (eds.), Las fuerzas de guerra en la construcción del estado: América Latina, siglo XIX (Rosario: Prohistoria Ediciones, 2012) and Koonings, Kees and Kruijt, Dirk (eds.), Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America (London: Zed Books, 2004). Less directly concerned with state building, but valuable for their treatments of state-centred violence, are Safford, Frank, ‘Reflections on the Internal Wars in Nineteenth-Century Latin America’, in Earle, Rebecca (ed.), Rumours of Wars: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000), pp. 6–28, and country-specific contributions in the same collection. For Colombia, see Palacios, Marco, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

The broadest historical treatments of the armed forces as an institution are Rouquié, Alain, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and two books by Loveman, Brian: The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993) and For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999). An essential compendium of many of the region’s wars, both internal and external, is Scheina’s, Robert L. two-volume Latin America’s Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899 and The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900–2001 (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003).

Many works focus on particular aspects of violence and state-making, without explicitly joining the two. For caudillismo, Lynch, John, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Chasteen, John Charles, Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), are essential. For violence and fraud as routine features of electoral politics see Graham, Richard ’s masterpiece, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), Stein, Steve, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980) and Guerra, François Xavier, ‘The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation and its European Roots’, Journal of Latin American Studies 26.1 (1994), 1–35. For its interpretative depth and range, and for exposing continuities and contrasts with the period of monarchical rule, almost all of Guerra’s work remains indispensable for the study of violence and state formation in the nineteenth century; begin with his Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992) and the collection he edited with Lempérière, Annick, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica: ambigüedades y problemas, siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998). A landmark collection of essays amid the rising tide of work on the failure of the rule of law is Méndez, Juan E., O’Donnell, Guillermo A. and Pinheiro, Paulo Sérgio de M. S. (eds.), The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); particularly insightful is O’Donnell’s concluding essay.

Rural rebellion and social revolution, staple themes of the historiography since the 1980s, have provided a platform for theoretical and empirical analyses of the role of violence in state formation. Here as in many areas, the quantity and quality of studies of Mexico outstrip those of other Latin American countries. The Mexican Revolution of 1910, looked to elsewhere in Latin America as a template for change, inspired a huge historiography; see Knight, Alan ’s monumental, two-volume The Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); a useful survey of the preceding century is Tutino, John, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Among the few well-grounded comparative treatments of rural violence is Mallon, Florencia, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). A mix of case studies and comprehensive interpretations of twentieth-century revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence are collected in Grandin, Greg and Joseph, Gilbert M. (eds.), A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For a sociologically ordered comparison of Cold War insurgencies, see Wickham-Crowley, Timothy P., Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Racketeering and banditry are old themes but their recent, newfound prominence, and their capacity to suborn or even substitute for state institutions, have attracted systematic attention in Arias, Enrique Desmond, ‘The Dynamics of Criminal Governance: Networks and Social Order in Rio de Janeiro’, Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006), 293–325; Felbab-Brown, Vanda, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010); Garay Salamanca, Luis Jorge and Salcedo-Albarán, Eduardo (eds.), Narcotráfico, corrupción y estados: cómo las redes ilícitas han reconfigurado las instituciones en Colombia, Guatemala y México (Mexico City: Debate, 2012). For Mexico, Guillermo Raúl Zepeda Lecuona’s massively documented Crimen sin castigo: procuración de justicia penal y ministerio público en México (Mexico City: Centro de Investigación para el Desarrollo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), is essential.

For a general overview of the Cambodian genocide within its historical context, begin with Chandler, David, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). See also Vickery, Michael, Cambodia, 1975–1982 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1984); Etcheson, Craig, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984); Kiernan, Ben, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Hinton, Alexander L, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). More detailed accounts of the rise of the Communist Party in Cambodia include Kiernan, Ben, How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975 (London: Verso, 1985) and Heder, Steven, Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model: Imitation and Independence, 1930–1975 (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2004). More broadly, for overviews of the conflicts leading up to the Cambodian genocide, specifically the Cambodian civil war (1970–5), see Isaacs, Arnold R., Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Deac, Wilfred P., Road to the Killing Fields: The Cambodian War of 1970–1975 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997); Shawcross, William, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002).

On more specific aspects of the Cambodian genocide, see Chandler, David, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); LeVine, Peg, Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births, and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2010); Harris, Ian, Buddhism under Pol Pot (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2007); Nhem, Boraden, The Khmer Rouge: Ideology, Militarism, and the Revolution that Consumed a Generation (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013). On foreign relations and Cambodia, see Westad, Odd Arne and Quinn-Judge, Sophie (eds.), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 (London: Routlege, 2006); Clymer, Kenton, Troubled Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007); Mertha, Andrew, Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

There are a number of accounts written from the perspective of journalists who covered the events, including Becker, Elizabeth, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (New York: Public Affairs, 1986); Chanda, Nayan, Brother Enemy: The War after the War (New York: Collier Books, 1986); Kamm, Henry, Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land (New York: Arcade, 1998).

Overall there is a dearth of biographies written about the main perpetrators. Two now exist on Pol Pot, including Chandler’s, David Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, rev. edn (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999) and Short’s, Philip Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). For accounts of Kaing Guek Eav, commandant of S-21 security-centre, see Dunlop, Nic, The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields (New York: Walker, 2005) and Cruvellier, Thierry, The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (New York: Ecco, 2011). There are many autobiographies written by survivors; see for example May, Someth, Cambodian Witness: The Autobiography of Someth May (London: Faber & Faber, 1986) and Ung, Loung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000).

There are a growing number of books that have explored Cambodia after the genocide. For a discussion on the conflict between Vietnam, China and Cambodia after the genocide, see Morris, Stephen J., Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). For more general accounts, see Etcheson, Craig, After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2005); Gottesman, Evan, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Slocomb, Margaret, The People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979–1989: The Revolution after Pol Pot (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003); Maguire, Peter, Facing Death in Cambodia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Many books are now appearing on the Cambodian genocide tribunal; see for example Fawthrop, Tom and Jarvis, Helen, Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (London: Pluto Press, 2004) and John D. Ciorciari and Anne Heindel (eds.), On Trial: The Khmer Rouge Accountability Process (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia). For discussions on the memorialisation of the Cambodian genocide, see Schlund-Vials, Cathy J., War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and Tyner, James A., Landscape, Memory, and Post-Violence in Cambodia (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

The best single-volume introductions to modern terrorism are Hoffman, Bruce, Inside Terrorism, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) and Townshend, Charles, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also see Schmid, Alex P., The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (London: Routledge, 2011).

The most-cited effort to organise all of modern terrorism into a historical framework is Rapoport, David C., ‘The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism’, in Cronin, Audrey Kurth and Ludes, James M. (eds.), Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), pp. 46–73. Crenshaw, Martha [Henderson] (ed.), Terrorism in Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 [1995]) provides a valuable methodological introduction and surveys of key movements and periods. Two standard works that survey the history of terrorism are Law, Randall D., Terrorism: A History, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) and Chaliand, Gérard and Blin, Arnaud (eds.), The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to ISIS, rev. edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). For an extensive reference work, see Law, Randall D (ed.), The Routledge History of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2015). Particularly valuable for its analysis and descriptions of the interaction of state and sub-state terrorisms is Miller, Martin A., The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society and the Dynamics of Political Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The most important work to examine terrorism as a cultural and linguistic construct is Zulaika, Joseba and Douglass, William A., Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996). For a primer on critical terrorism studies, see Jackson, Richard et al., Terrorism: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the development of the field of terrorism studies itself, see Stampnitzky, Lisa, Disciplining Terror: How Experts and Others Invented Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The best anthology of primary sources is Laqueur, Walter (ed.), Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings and Manuals of al Qaeda, Hamas, and Other Terrorists from around the World and throughout the Ages (New York: Reed, 2004).

On terror/ism in the French Revolution, see Andress, David, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). On Karl Heinzen, see Grob-Fitzgibbon, Benjamin, ‘From the Dagger to the Bomb: Karl Heinzen and the Evolution of Political Terror’, Terrorism and Political Violence 16.1 (2004), 97–115. The best work on the political and social milieu in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that produced modern terrorism is Zamoyski, Adam, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789–1848 (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

On Russian revolutionary terrorism, see Venturi, Franco, The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) and Geifman, Anna, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

For general works on anarchism and anarcho-terrorism, see Joll, James, The Anarchists, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) and Bach Jensen, Richard, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism, 1878–1934: An International History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). On Johann Most: Trautmann, Frederic, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most (Westport: Greenwood, 1980). For France: Merriman, John, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). For Spain: Maura, J. Romero, ‘Terrorism in Barcelona and its Impact on Spanish Politics 1904–1909’, Past & Present 41 (1968), 130–83.

The literature on terrorism in America is large and growing quickly. On the Molly Maguires, see Kenny, Kevin, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The classic study of the Haymarket Riot is Avrich, Paul, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). For a revisionist account, see Messer-Kruse, Timothy, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The best work on terrorism in the United States in the nineteenth century is Fellman, Michael, In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For anarchist violence and the Red Scare of the 1910s–20s, see Gage, Beverly, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

The most valuable survey of the Ku Klux Klan is Wade, Wyn Craig, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1987]). On Reconstruction, see Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, rev. edn (New York: HarperPerennial, 2014). The two best studies of Klan and white supremacist violence during Reconstruction are Rable, George C., But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) and Trelease, Allen W., White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 [1971]). On lynching in America, see Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002). For a pictorial account, see Allen, James, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). The Equal Justice Initiative has published the most complete tally of racially inspired lynchings in Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd edn (2015). The full report can be found at https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.

For a general overview of ethno-nationalist terrorism, see Byman, Daniel, ‘The Logic of Ethnic Terrorism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 21.2 (1998), 149–69. Not surprisingly, there is a large and growing body of literature on the various ethno-nationalist/anti-colonial conflicts of the 1940s–70s. For an excellent analysis of the various struggles waged against Britain midcentury, see Grob-Fitzgibbon, Benjamin, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the role of terrorism and insurgency in the formation of Israel, see Hoffman, Bruce, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947 (New York: Knopf, 2015). A well-regarded account of the Malayan Emergency is Noel Barber, , War of the Running Dogs: Malaya, 1948–1960 (London: Cassell, 2004 [1971]). The classic study of the Algerian War of Independence is Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: NYRB, 2006 [1977]); the new standard is Evans, Martin, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For two excellent comparative analyses, see Merom, Gil, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Nagl, John A., Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [2002]). For two distinctly different takes on Yasser Arafat and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, see Rubin, Barry and Rubin, Judith Colp, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Aburish, Saïd, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator, rev. edn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004). A comprehensive account of the Basque struggle is Mees, Ludger, Nationalism, Violence, and Democracy: The Basque Clash of Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On the IRA and Northern Ireland, see English, Richard, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

For a valuable survey and analysis of the radical leftist movements of the 1960s–80s, see Freeman, Michael, Freedom or Security: The Consequences for Democracies Using Emergency Powers to Fight Terror (Westport: Praeger, 2003). A definitive history of the Tupamaros is yet to be written. In the meantime, the best account is Brum, Pablo, The Robin Hood Guerrillas: The Epic Journey of Uruguay’s Tupamaros (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2014). See also Marighella, Carlos, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press, 2002 [1969]). On the various movements in the USA and Europe, see Burrough, Bryan, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin, 2015); Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Porta, Donatella Della, ‘Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy’, in Crenshaw, Martha [Henderson] (ed.), Terrorism in Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 [1995]), pp. 105–59.

In recent decades, the market has been flooded with books on jihadism and radical Islamism; many are deeply polemical and of limited value. Among the best works are Aslan, Reza, How to Win a Cosmic War (New York: Random House, 2009); Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Kepel, Gilles, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Lewis, Bernard, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003). For the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood, see Lia, Brynjar, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement, 1928–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the key figure in the modern history of Islamism, see Calvert, John, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Bergesen, Albert (ed.), The Sayyid Qutb Reader (London: Routledge, 2007).

On Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and 9/11, see Bergen, Peter, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006); Coll, Steve, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden (New York: Penguin, 2004); Leah Farrall, ‘How al-Qaeda Works’, Foreign Affairs 90 (March–April 2011), 128–38; Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006). Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s statements are collected in Ibrahim, Raymond (ed.), The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007). The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are exhaustively covered in Burke, Jason, The 9/11 Wars (New York: Penguin, 2011) and Coll, Steve, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Penguin, 2018).