Develops a novel theory of war and revenge with far-reaching implications for the role of individuals in international relations.

This book offers an original assessment of the ways in which the sociocultural code of blood revenge and its modern remnants shape irregular warfare. Despite being a common driver of communal violence, blood revenge has received little attention from scholars. With many civil wars and insurgencies occurring in areas where the custom lingers, strengthening our understanding of blood revenge is essential for discerning how conflicts change and evolve. Drawing upon extensive multidisciplinary evidence, this book is the first in the literature on civil war and insurgency to analyse the impact of blood revenge and its modern remnants on irregular warfare. Even when blood revenge undergoes erosion, its unregulated version still shapes the social fabric of insurgency, although in different ways than its institutionalised counterpart. At times of political instability, the presence of a culture of retaliation weighs heavily on the dynamics of violent mobilisation, target selection, recruitment, and disengagement. This book brings in evidence from dozens of conflicts, providing unprecedented insights into how a better understanding of blood revenge can improve military blueprints for irregular warfare. This book will be of much interest to students of insurgency, terrorism, military and strategic studies, anthropology, and sociology, as well as to decision-makers and irregular warfare professionals.

An auteur and the creator of multiple cinematic universes, James Wan has become one of the most successful directors in history, his films breaking box office records worldwide. Yet there is little scholarship on Wan's work. This collection of new essays fills the gap with contributions from around the globe offering analysis of his film and television productions, including Saw (2004), Aquaman (2018) and The Conjuring Universe franchise, along with less well-known works like Death Sentence (2007), Dead Silence (2007) and his pilot for the new MacGyver series. For the first time, Wan's films are explored in-depth from wide range of critical perspectives.

How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field, this book offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. Austin J. Knuppe argues that people adopt survival repertoires—a variety of social practices, tools, organized routines, symbols, and rhetorical strategies—to navigate wartime violence and detect threats. He traces how repertoires varied among different communities over the course of the conflict. In areas insulated from insurgent control, such as cosmopolitan Baghdad, local residents had the flexibility to support coalition forces while also voicing opposition to government policies. For Iraqis in rural communities confronting insurgent control, collaboration and resistance entailed significant risks. In Sunni-majority communities in the western desert, passive acquiescence and active cooperation temporarily insulated Iraqis from insurgent victimization. For ethnic and religious minorities in the north, however, flight or resistance proved the only viable options. In many communities, local residents mobilized neighborhood self-defense groups and militias loosely aligned with coalition forces once the tides turned against the Islamic State. Beyond contributing to academic and policy debates about civilian protection during wartime, Surviving the Islamic State foregrounds everyday people’s experiences while modeling an ethical approach for conducting field research in conflict-affected communities.

What explains violence against civilians in civil wars? Why do groups kill civilians in areas where they have full military control and their rivals have no military presence? This innovative book connects pre-war politics to patterns of violence during civil war. It argues that both local political rivalry and local revenge account for violence against civilians. Armed groups perpetrate direct violence jointly with local civilians, who collaborate when violence can help them gain or consolidate local political control. As civil war continues, revenge motives also come into play, leading to spirals of violence at a local level. In an important contribution to the study of the Spanish Civil War, Balcells combines statistical analyses with ethnographic and qualitative research to provide new insights to scholars and academic researchers with an interest in civil war, politics and conflict processes. Rivalry and Revenge is theoretically and empirically rich, and it offers a theory and method generalizable to a wide set of cases.

What connects political violence in Classical Athens and state terrorism in the Roman republic to the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka and the modern destruction of monuments? Using 9/11 as a lens through which to examine past instances of terrorism, this book presents a wide global view of the use of terror and its impact throughout history. Contributors are: Jaime A. González-Ocaña, Aaron L. Beek, Francesco Mori, Gaius Stern, Timothy Smith, João Nisa, Ölbei Tamás, James Crossland, Paul J. Cook, Chris Millington, Vineeth Mathoor, Dmitry Shlapentokh, Kalinga Tudor Silva, Cserkits Michael, Katty Cristina Lima Sá, Tatiana Konrad, Daniel Leach, Paul J. Cook, Mark Briskey, Silke Zoller, Elizabeth L. Miller, and William V. Hudon.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen states engaged in long-term conflicts with asymmetrically weaker non-state actors (NSA). States aim to end these conflicts as quickly as possible by combining force and diplomacy to socialize these militants—meaning give them the characteristics of states—in order to make a credible bargain achievable. The militant’s characteristics determine the state’s optimal strategy. In times of conflict, politicians and pundits often march out an oft-cited phrase in support of negotiations: “if you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” This is only possible when the opponent is willing to make peace under acceptable terms and able to enforce abidance. Some opponents have an ideologically driven fundamental purpose that precludes renouncing violence under terms that a state could accept. Others have reasonable demands and are structured in a way that allows productive negotiations. In other cases, the non-state militant is not yet the type that can be bargained with but can be socialized into this type through a state’s correct application of force and diplomacy. I call this “socialization logic.” I argue that optimally, states tailor their strategy to socialize with their opponent, to make it possible to successfully negotiate peace. In practice, the state’s strategy is often distorted by its internal and external constraints. Socialization logic provides a novel typology of non-state militants based on how well interstate conflict bargaining concepts can be applied to them. It looks beyond tactics, to systematize a framework for understanding how leaders tailor strategy towards non-state opponents based on their characteristics. Socialization logic examines the NSA type as endogenous to the strategy that the state employs and provides a framework for leaders to design a strategy to end the conflict. Finally, socialization logic synthesizes critical NSA attributes (ideology, leadership structure, and governance function) and the state’s strategy (distorted by constraints) into in an interactive model. Through 41 interviews, primary and secondary source data, I analyze the United States’, Russia’s and Israel’s asymmetric conflicts with militants and demonstrate that socialization logic most comprehensively explains their strategies throughout those conflicts.