The Vietnamese Le dynasty launched a massive invasion of its neighbor, Champa, in 1471. The invasion, which was the culmination of centuries of back and forth conflict, produced widespread Cham deaths, and the permanent weakening of the southern kingdom. The Vietnamese actions, resulting in at least 40,000 recorded deaths, may well have been genocidal, though the limited historical record is unclear. It does, though, reveal that the Vietnamese used beheading against many of the victims, an action that appears punitive rather than incidental to warfare, and uniquely applied to the Cham. Furthermore, the Vietnamese carried out a project to rename geographical features in the Cham territories, suggesting a degree of cultural erasure while also substantially and permanently reducing the size of the Cham realm. Thus, although the evidence for genocide is ambiguous, it is clear that the Vietnamese actions in the late fifteenth century sought permanently to reduce the influence and threat posed by Champa via an overwhelming show of force.

Chapter 3 examines a double paradox with regards to ISIS and fear: first, that ISIS beheadings are a spectacle, while at the same time, there exists an image ban on viewing these images, and second, that ISIS is both inherently known as a threat, yet also fundamentally unknowable. It uses the framing of the Bilderverbot, the secularized image ban of biblical origin, to examine how beheadings are represented as unrepresentable, and how this paradox enters into normalcy. The chapter tells the story of two beheadings: one of an Iraqi head and one of a Western one. The first is shown but not seen, and the latter is seen but not shown. A micro-level examination of the severed head image allows these stories to emerge. The first account, concerning the severed head of an Iraqi man working as an informant for American soldiers, allows for an examination of how beheadings are often depicted in the language of horror, or as an example of “body horror.” The second story, the story of ISIS beheadings, is one in which the severed head has become a fact of international politics and in which fear of ISIS beheadings is taken for granted.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.