This essay examines the reciprocal contest of wills as mediated through the use of political violence from roughly 1773 to the end of the war in 1783. In other terms, it covers the escalating application of violence and how that led to outright war in April 1775, as well as the war itself. In both periods, violence was used to influence the will of one’s opponent and the political preferences of the undecided—but sometimes its political intent was exceeded, with escalatory effects. Three broad categories of violence are considered here. The first, “intimidative and catalytic” was primarily associated with the period from 1773 to 1776, in which violence was used by both sides, mostly publicly, to force political opponents to accede or step aside. Some of those efforts at intimidation catalyzed further violence, leading ultimately to armed military confrontation. Once the war had begun, the strong conventions associated with “war” shaped military behavior by both sides’ regular forces, although not always successfully, and always subject to logistical requirements. These behaviors form the second category of “Regular and Logistical.” The third category, “Retaliatory” was primarily associated with peripheral militia forces, which were much less restrained by the customs and usages of war, and often instead indulged in escalating retaliation.

This chapter demonstrates that when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and latterly Oliver Cromwell ruled in England the word conquest involved the deliberate slaying of many inhabitants in the area being subjected to conquest, and the taking of measures to ensure that the survivors would abandon their identity to become English and Protestant. This means that when the English government undertook to conquer Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s and again in the 1650s, it was launching campaigns that, by modern definitions, were genocidal in intent. The author shows that this reality was acknowledged by historians of Ireland, regardless of their religious and political allegiances to the close of the nineteenth century even if the terms they used a different vocabulary. The chapter then proceeds to explain why academic authors in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century chose to discount these gory aspects of Ireland’s early modern past , and how the older verities have been rehabilitated to recent decades. The author throughout draws a distinction between the many massacres that occurred in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the attempted conquests, with associated intended genocides, of which there were but two.

When Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, Ishiguro indicated that he ‘remain[ed] fascinated by memory’, and that his next challenge was to examine the themes of national memory and forgetting. The Buried Giant, published in 2015, represents Ishiguro’s unique meditations on collective memory, understanding, and the complexities of forgetting. Utilizing a third-person narrative voice, Ishiguro orchestrates a post-Arthurian landscape of buried slaughter and collective amnesia, whilst engaging in a critical enquiry into the nature of shared memories in relationships. This chapter will begin by considering Ishiguro’s memory work in his earlier novels, before an investigation into the fallibility of memory and understanding precipitated by the enigmatic mist. This is followed by an exploration of the question of culpability and the complexities of collective memory. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the figure of the boatman, the island of forgetting, and the implications of an enforced forgetting.

This chapter introduces the main themes explored in this book, provides an overview of the methodological framework utilized and summarizes the main claims advanced.

This chapter addresses the contention that ICL practice focuses myopically on horrific spectacles because all, or at least the most serious, international crimes necessarily involve the production of such spectacles. It does so by demonstrating that ICL, in its current form, appears capable of addressing forms of harm causation significantly different in nature and aesthetic familiarity than those it has overwhelmingly been applied to in the past. It does so in two parts. First, it considers scholarship that examines how genocide, atrocity, and mass violence actually manifest themselves and unfold. This scholarship highlights the dynamic, causally multifaceted nature of most atrocity commission processes. Second, it examines the degree to which the doctrinal substance of ICL could account for the causal heterogeneity and complexity of atrocities. Through this analysis, this chapter demonstrates that, in theory, ICL could be applied to a variety of harm causation modalities failing to conform to the atrocity aesthetic.

This concluding chapter offers some thoughts on the broader implications of the arguments made in this book. It specifically considers how the book’s contention that a dominant “atrocity aesthetic” influences how international crimes are recognized and conceptualized relates to broader debates concerning the role of international law and international criminal justice, such as those related to questions of determinacy, power, sovereignty, and Global North–South relations. It also considers how aesthetic biases may affect the actual purposes served by international criminal justice as a global project, raising the concerning possibility that one unstated purpose international criminal prosecutions serve is to provide cathartic relief to distant publics exposed to the ugliness of atrocity violence, rather than focusing on the interests and needs of those most directly affected by such violence. It concludes with a call to abandon outdated understandings of atrocities as horrific and spectacular eruptions of violence, and to reconsider what international crimes are in light of the many forms atrocity violence may actually take.

Chapter five has as its central focus the strategies employed in conflict and their link to escalation. The chapter discusses the atrocity shift or the transgression of ethical boundaries as a major form of escalation. Furthermore, it assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the two predominant strategies of rebel groups, terrorism and insurgency.

In the second chapter the existing insights from the literature are treated. How have others thought about and conceptualised escalation and de-escalation? How do violent interactions between rebels and the state escalate? How can we measure escalation? The chapter sets out the methodology that is used in the book.

In the years after the Great War, many national literatures registered anxiety about the course of Western civilization. American modernism sometimes presented itself as exceptional on this subject – as untouched by European prospects of decline, or as vitally wedded to regeneration through violence. This chapter considers poetic responses to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). As a poem written by an American living in Europe, The Waste Land both raises the apocalyptic subject for American writers and allows opportunities for national self-definition by contrast. To Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, Eliot’s pessimism seemed to abandon the distinctive potential of American literature; in The Bridge (1930) and Spring and All (1923), these poets treat apocalypse in American history as an opportunity to encounter the new. Troubling the distinction implied here between conservative and radical apocalypticism, the chapter also illustrates how Eliot’s tragic apocalypse has been relevant to hemispheric writers of color, seeking to represent the cataclysmic settling of a continent. In his Rights of Passage (1967), Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite reworks from The Waste Land a sense of apocalyptic time wherein the past – including The Waste Land itself – is perpetually disfigured but remains ruinously present.

Communal violence took many forms in early modern Europe, but much of it was shaped by an unprecedented level of inter-confessional conflict. The Reformation resulted in the rapid spread of minorities which, in the sixteenth century in particular, caused clashes with the majority confession and the authorities seeking to curb civil strife. Violence was often localised and small scale but could also be significant and widespread. As regimes sought to incorporate the new reality of confessional coexistence, so resentment and tensions grew within communities, often resulting in outbursts of both popular and official violence. Attacks on individuals and groups as well as objects, through acts of iconoclasm, were commonplace; massacres and other atrocities less so. This chapter explores these issues with respect to communities across both eastern and western Europe and argues that the similarities are more striking than the differences. It considers in what circumstances outbreaks of intercommunal violence were more likely, how successfully such tensions were accommodated, and to what extent there was a decline in their incidence as the period progressed. By 1800, it appears that political violence had displaced confessional violence within communities as the predominant form of repression and exclusion.

This chapter provides a survey of poetic reactions to human rights violations in the contemporary world. Theodor Adorno declared in 1949, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” a sentiment symptomatic of the shock that made literature seem inadequate in dealing with the scale of human injustice revealed by the Holocaust. However, the human capacity for wrongdoing remains endemic to our times. Wherever human rights violations have proved irresistible, poets have sought redress through the symbolic action of poetry, giving proof of how we might invert the sentiments of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In the teeth of modern barbarism, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, poetry continues to remind humanity of what will keep us humane and human.

This chapter considers how forms of narrative literature, particularly life-writing, serve as technologies in the making of the modern personhood that in turn anchor contemporary human rights. Drawing from Benveniste’s work on the relationship between grammatical personhood and subjectivity, the chapter is structured into “gradations” of personhood, examining their implications on human rights discourse and its subjects. The first-person form common to life-writing, with its centering of the speakerly “I,” operates in the ethical domain of sentiment and empathy; whereas the second-person form of the testimony, with it’s construction of an “I-you,” depends more on a process of interpellation than empathizing. Meanwhile, the third-person form, which may seem less relevant to human rights discourse, provides insight into the ways in which collective bodies, such as corporations, lay claim to human rights. The chapter closes with a reflection on posthumanism and the zero-person or non-human as a potential departure point for probing the limits of the human subject that underlies human rights discourse.