"Heirs of Flesh and Paper" tells the story of early modern dynastic politics through subjects’ practical responses to royal illness, failing princely reproduction, and heirs’ premature deaths. It treats connected dynastic crises between 1699 and 1716 as illustrative for early modern European political regimes in which the rulers’ corporeality defined politics. This political order grappled with the endemic uncertainties induced by dynastic bodies. By following the day-to-day practices of knowledge making in response to the unpredictability of royal health, the book shows how the ruling family’s mortal coils regularly threatened to destabilize the institutionalized legal fiction of kingship. Dynastic politics was not only as a transitory stage of state formation, part of elite cooperation, or a cultural construct. It needs to be approached through everyday practices that put ailing dynastic bodies front and center. In a period of intensifying political planning, it constituted one of the most important sites for changing the political itself.

What is the role of founding leaders in shaping terrorist organizations? What follows the loss of this formative leader? These questions are especially important to religious terrorist groups, in which leaders are particularly revered. Tricia L. Bacon and Elizabeth Grimm provide a groundbreaking analysis of how religious terrorist groups manage and adapt to major shifts in leadership. They demonstrate that founders create the base from which their successors operate. Founders establish and explain the group’s mission, and they determine and justify how it seeks to achieve its objectives. Bacon and Grimm argue that how successors position themselves in terms of the founder shapes a terrorist group’s future course. They examine how and why different types of successors choose to pursue incremental or discontinuous change. Bacon and Grimm emphasize that the instability surrounding succession can place a group at its most vulnerable—the precise time to explore options to weaken or defeat it. Bacon and Grimm highlight similarities between Islamic terrorist groups abroad and Christian white nationalist groups such as the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Drawing on extensive field research in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan, Terror in Transition features detailed analysis of groups such as al-Shabaab, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda in Iraq / the Islamic State in Iraq, as well as the KKK. Offering a rigorous theoretical perspective on terrorist leadership transition, this policy-relevant book provides actionable recommendations for counterterrorism practitioners.