The concluding chapter argues that the consolidation of the Company state in India led to a radical reconfiguration of the politics of Muslim pilgrimage. From 1818, a “paramount” Company Raj sought to secure its newly acquired sovereign supremacy by designating as legally deviant or permissible a host of circulating figures in and around India, including hajj pilgrims. Yet, against this backdrop, the British also became increasingly anxious of the supposedly subversive forces that were being smuggled into the Indian Subcontinent from Arabia by so-called Wahhabis, a colonial byword for militant jihadis. But then, in its efforts to tackle the violent insurgencies of “Muhammadan fanatics” as a specifically political problem, and so distinct from the putatively “religious” practices of pilgrim “faqirs,” the Company state and its secular legal regimes also became entangled in administrative quandaries of their own making. The result was not only pervasive forms of colonial “Mussulmanophobia” and repeated recourses to state violence against suspected Wahhabis under the cover of states of emergency. With the bigger and bloodier crisis of 1857, it was also a set of official gestures that radically recast and reified “religion” as the natural wellspring of modern Muslim politics in South Asia.

This chapter critically considers the historic and contemporary entanglements of the nonprofit sector with the state and the market, and the implications of such entanglements on nonprofits, marginalized communities, and the possibility of social change. Interrogating what happens to the structural institutional form of the nonprofit when intertwined with the state and the economy in what some call the nonprofit industrial complex, Rojas assesses the fallout that leads to exacerbated policing and incarceration of women and communities of color, among other deleterious impacts. The work of naming these concerns and critiques is necessary for nonprofits to potentially become avenues for social transformation. The chapter concludes with practical interventions toward building organizations capable of creating more just futures.

Chapter 3 reveals how violent individuals and a violent state are structured in the Constitution. Here, violent, White self-determination (the right of White individuals to overthrow government) and liberalism (the systemic differences central to a liberal state) mix with republicanism (a decentralization of authority that privileges violent acts of citizens, a group most often defined as propertied, White men). In Article IV, Section 4, the Second Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment, this chapter reveals the key formulations and tensions of American violence.

Chapter 9 traces worker repression in and around the 1877 worker protests. The crucible of low-road capitalism delivered the Great Strikes of 1877, but the layers of enforcement - from citizens and local police to militia and national troops - reveal the exclusive nature of the new industrial order. Since the Panic of 1873, railroad corporations had maintained profitability by lowering the wages of their workers. By 1877, workers’ wages moved from unequal to unsustainable as many now earned half their 1872 pay. While social and political leaders spoke sympathetically of laborers and their low earnings at the start of the Great Strikes, soon, in response to violent acts of working-class resistance (usually against corporate property), such rhetoric disappeared. Instead, these leaders framed workers as vagabonds and criminals - persons in need of surveillance and control. The workers’ violence was used as a reason to attack workingmen’s bodies and labor mutualism. When mixed with the hostile differences of liberal society, differences intended to keep wages low and the working class divided, the laborers on the bottom endured the greatest physical and economic harm.

British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”

Resisting Racial Capitalism begins with the premise that we need to look beyond the hegemony of the state and its grammars of justice. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson, it argues that the state is not a neutral arbiter of justice that can or should be appealed to for rights, recognition, or restitution. Rather, the state is a relation of violence which is central to racial capitalism. This is a type of violence which cannot be reformed away through a politics that merely strives to make oppressive institutions more diverse, inclusive, or tolerant. As a permanent war waged on those deemed delinquent, wayward, and undeserving, the state must itself be abolished.

After at least two decades of the proliferation of narconarratives mediated by the official discourse of “drug cartels,” an emerging current of writers, filmmakers, and journalists have renewed a critical approach to state violence and its implications beyond typical assumptions about organized crime. From the thousands of killings of the so-called war on drugs to the forced disappearance of forty-three students in the state of Guerrero in 2014, this counterhegemonic critique aims to rethink – and, more importantly, to reimagine – the most pressing events of violence as the result of social strategies of control and exploitation promoted by state structures and geopolitics. This essay proposes to analyze the politicized imagination intersecting state violence and drug trafficking that deliberately leaves behind the habitual hegemonic narconarratives to articulate instead a critical understanding of the criminal networks as by-products of official power. Along with the analysis of key works of fiction, film, and journalistic investigations, I will engage debates on state violence and neoliberalism in the age of permanent national security crises.

This chapter sets out the book’s main theoretical claims. It argues that understanding the emergence of revolutionary challenge along ethnic lines requires a focus on local-level interactions between social actors and state agents and how they vary over time. This approach directs attention to variation within ethnic groups and, specifically, to linkages between sub-ethnic units and the state. The chapter then presents the book’s main theoretical intervention: state linkages often condition the participation of “ethnically excluded” populations, and incumbent response to challenge is often not focused singly on dividing the population on ethnic lines but includes important forms of conciliation aimed at preserving cross-ethnic clients. This conciliation often fails, however, because informal, ethnically dominated autocratic regimes resort to violence to deal with immediate threats posed by prolonged urban demonstrations and challenger violence, shattering many of the linkages forged across ethnic lines. This view of challenger–incumbent interaction under ethnically dominated rule challenges the dominant view that regimes intentionally polarize their polities on ethnic lines to cling to power; the patchwork of bargains such regimes strike with various elements of the populations they rule can channel contention toward ethnic violence, even when ethnicization is not in the incumbent’s interest.

This chapter sets the political and social context for the events of the 2011 Syrian uprising. It describes the topography of ethnic boundaries and, using original quantitative data, shows that ʿAlawis were disproportionate beneficiaries of state largesse, accessed through informal ties and formal positions in the civil service and military. Nonetheless, substantial segments of the Sunni Arab population were also tied to the state through personalistic ties and public institutions. Then it describes the relationship between ethnicity and state access in historical and theoretical terms, arguing that the Baʿth regime instrumentalized existing social structures in some cases, building ties to local leaders with customary status, and worked to break down these ties in other cases, building new ties with individual citizens through corporatist development and state employment. Finally, the chapter examines the effects of neoliberal policies, enacted after 2000, on these linkages. It argues that these policies exacerbated the suffering of many Syrians already lacking state access but left the cross-ethnic structure of state–society ties intact.

This chapter narrates the events of the first year of the Syrian uprising, drawing on an original newspaper event catalog, activist-generated databases of non-state actor fatalities, and numerous town-specific reports composed by Syrian and other Arab research organizations. In doing so, it describes the outcome to be explained in subsequent chapters: variation in forms of challenge to the Syrian regime over time and space. The picture of contention in Syria presented in this chapter suggests that there was no lockstep progression from nonviolent, urban civic protests to ethnic insurgency in the countryside during the first year of the Syrian uprising. Rather, violence erupted almost immediately following the onset of challenge at some sites, while remaining absent at others throughout the entire first year of the uprising. Claims advanced by challengers varied similarly; they remained focused on civic demands throughout the first year in some areas, while quickly jumping from local to ethnic grievances in others.

This chapter examines the impact of the fusion between religious claims and nationalism on state policies – domestically, regionally, and internationally. It offers a comparative perspective on the extent to which religious claims bestow sacredness on the state’s workings of power – or what we define as sacralized politics. The chapter analyzes how, through hegemonic nationalism, states invoke religious claims to legitimize political and national strategic goals in domestic and international politics. To trace the matrix of power that sacralization of politics mobilizes, and when looking comparatively at various case studies, the chapter points to three main (among other) modes of sacralization’s profound impact on politics. The first operates through managing consciousness, including the construction of self-identity in relation to others; the second, through territoriality and the politics of land claims; and the third via political governance, using violence and a necropolitical regime of control. While each mode can operate separately, all operate through mutual reinforcement and each with elements of sacredness, resulting in an emergent power structure that is self-sustaining, religiously infused, and resistant to change.

This chapter examines Sa’dallah Wannous’ use and interrogation of history as means of carving out a space for critical reflection on pressing contemporary issues such as state violence. It focuses on two of Wannous’ late plays, Historical Miniatures and Drunken Days and argues that Wannous’s highly literary dramatic language consistently interrogates history and tradition. The chapter also includes an analysis of two significant productions of Historical Miniatures, one in Beirut in 2000, staged by the renowned Lebanese director Nidal al Achkar, and the other a daring site-specific production in the prison area of the actual thirteenth-century citadel in Damascus where the play is set, by Syrian director Naila Al-Atrash, which was staged shortly after Wannous’ death in 1997. Since the citadel had been used to house political prisoners during the early years of the regime of Hafez al-Assad, who died three years later, Al-Atrash’s production was inevitably interpreted as a pointed critique of the Syrian state’s continuing use of violence and incarceration as means of suppressing dissent.

The chapter explores how politics are sacralized in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, a colonized space. It analyzes the interlocking dynamics between Israel’s settler-colonial governance and religious and nationalist Zionism. The chapter closely examines Israel’s modalities of violence and the ways in which they form and inform the state’s policy, thereby uncovering Israel’s sacralization of politics in occupied East Jerusalem (oEJ). The chapter shares the political significance of such interlocking exchanges over three sites and experiences within oEJ: (1) law and legal practices; (2) a specific type of violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers against Palestinians known as “Price Tag”; and (3) the “occupation of the senses” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2017). The chapter concludes by demonstrating the way global politics, local settler-colonial politics, and national laws, far from being neutral, are embedded in a biopolitical regime that subordinates the colonized. The sacralization of politics in Israel is supported by an ongoing global settler-colonial movement, which claims that the Jewish people have exclusive rights to the “promised land.” This movement has produced a Jewish state whose oppression, discrimination, exploitation, and cruelty against the Palestinians is essential to its governance.

This chapter examines the complexity of rights-claiming in South Korea related to the violence on Jeju Island around April 3, 1948. The Jeju case demonstrates that rights claiming and counterclaiming over seventy years shaped the transitional justice process, which can be divided into four distinct periods according to the nature and dynamics of rights claims and counterclaims. I find that rights claims by both sides were not made in a vacuum but within a thick layer of existing discourses and narratives, colored by existing power structures. Over the decades, interesting dynamics of claim diversification and frame resonance occurred depending on the opportunity structures in a particular time and space. I found that rights claims diversify when the counterclaims are strong and the opportunity structure opens up. In addition, frame resonance influences the effectiveness of rights claims.

In Peru, the term ‘terrorism’ is unequivocally linked to the Communist Party of Peru-Sendero Luminoso (PCP-SL), best known in English as the Shining Path. The PCP-SL took up arms in 1980 to unleash the bloodiest and most lengthy insurgency recorded in Peru’s modern history. The ‘time of terrorism’ refers to the years from 1980 to approximately 1998, in which Sendero launched their so-called ‘people’s war’ (guerra popular) with the ultimate goal of taking over the state and establishing the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Because of their systematic attack on all forms of organised society, some have described SL as the opposite of a social movement. Others have likened it to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, in the light of their authoritarian ideology and methods, and their agrarian-based self-sufficient communist utopia. Today, the scars of the war are likely to be unnoticed by foreign visitors and a younger generation of Peruvians. A celebratory mood has taken over since the first decade of the twentieth century, making references to the recent past of political violence an uncomfortable truth that many have preferred not to look at. But this national celebratory mood belies scars of violence that run deep. Terrorism has a history, which should not be detached from the history of terrorism, the term. It is the awareness of this history that will free us from reproducing the state’s repressive gaze and to embrace our citizenship.