The Conclusion traces the arc of Philippine Drug War through the present day, a trajectory that encompasses both Duterte’s arrest and pending trial at the International Criminal Court, and the changing public activism of Catholic elites as the Drug War violence fades, but challenges of democratic backsliding persist. There is evidence that Catholic elites’ willingness to publicly defend human rights during the Drug War buttressed their perceived moral authority, but questions remain about the nature of effective intervention to strengthen democracy more broadly. The chapter’s middle section uses key elements of the theory of religious protection from populist state violence to identify substantive new research questions relating to religion and democratic backsliding, populism and political violence, and civil society and human rights. A final section sets out practical implications of the research for the on-the-ground work of religious elites, civil society activists, local government officials, journalists, and others to identify specific, actionable steps to take should state violence under populism threaten local communities.

This chapter builds a theory of local community protection from populist state violence, focusing on the “meso” level where state agents and communities interact. After describing the characteristics of this new type of political violence, it explains how two key variables – the moral commitment of local elites (Catholic priests and other religious actors) and the capacity of local social organizations (in this case, the Catholic parish) – facilitate community protection. Commitment and capacity have a path-dependent character, reflecting formative experiences for clergy, exposure to Catholic religious orders with histories of public action, and long church embeddedness in local communities. These two independent variables operate via six mechanisms: disrupting operations and reducing targets function through interactions with local state agents, threatening accountability and reintegrating victims involve partnerships with civil society, and raising moral salience and building solidarity work at the level of the local public.

The eighth chapter digs into the topic of political violence in the United States and how Trump has used the threat of violence as another tool for maintaining control over his party. Unlike some modern political coverage that suggested that what happened on January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol was unprecedented, this provides a brief history of American political violence. It then turns to more evidence from the county chairs to understand their beliefs about political violence. While the vast majority reject violence as a legitimate act in pursuit of political ends, there are important differences in assessments of January 6th, and evidence suggests that who oppose Trump are far more worried about political violence than his supporters are.

This chapter centers on Bieral’s role in the 1854 Anthony Burns fugitive slave case, where he organized armed guards to prevent Burns’s rescue. Bieral’s participation reveals his alignment with pro-slavery Democrats and his complex racial identity. The chapter interrogates his motivations – political loyalty, racial self-interest, and personal pride – while contrasting his actions with abolitionist efforts. Bieral’s subsequent assault on attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr., exemplifies the violent enforcement of political power. The narrative situates Bieral within the broader context of antebellum racial politics, highlighting the paradox of a possibly mixed-race man defending slavery to assert his whiteness and authority.

Bieral’s service in the Civil War, particularly at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, transformed his public image from thug to hero. The chapter chronicles his bravery, injuries, and subsequent court martial, revealing tensions between his violent past and military discipline. Bieral’s postwar activities – supporting Reconstruction, working in customs, and engaging in political violence – illustrate the persistence of private coercion in public life. His association with figures such as Boss Tweed and involvement in the Erie Railroad wars underscore the continuity of corruption and brutality. The chapter situates Bieral within the contested terrain of postbellum governance and reform.

This chapter claims that Emerson’s consideration of slavery occurs in terms that are by definition contradictory, as he both emphasizes and tries to reconcile a series of oppositions within transcendentalist principles. These oppositions include conflicts between self-reliance and social reform; between labor as a means of self-development and of economic development; between absolute moral law and temporal statute law; between teleological history and evolutionary history; and, finally, between the refusal of violence and the use of violence as a political expedient. The chapter examines the complexities of Emerson’s formulations of these transcendentalist oppositions, showing how his commentaries on slavery can play out in counterintuitive ways, such that Emerson’s idiosyncratic version of antislavery “free labor” ideology supports his expressed resistance to a career as an abolitionist, his argument that slavery contravenes a “higher” law than statute law equivocally denounces slavery, and his defense of abolitionist violence transforms physical force into moral force.

Genocide is a contested concept with normative, legal, political, and empirical dimensions, each pulling in different directions. The chapter emphasizes that, in addition, a fundamental contradiction exists in the concept: The legal definition, anchored in an international treaty, dominates the social sciences, even though the legal definition is problematic for the specification of a particular type of violence. The concept is thus perpetually trapped between legal and empirical imperatives, rendering it unwieldy for the social science objective of isolating a particular type of phenomenon. The chapter rejects the solution of jettisoning the concept, instead proposing a set of solutions for how to retain the concept and separate it from its legal origins. The chapter concludes by arguing that such solutions are unlikely to carry the day, but that social scientists should still seek to develop a rigorous conceptualization of the term that allows for the identification of specific types of political violence. Finally, a postscript offers an interim assessment – from the perspective of this chapter – of the war in the Middle East that began on October 7, 2023.

This chapter explores the complex interaction between (human) migration and terrorism. It proposes a ‘terrorism-migration cycle’ to investigate systematically this interaction for various stages of the migration process. Importantly, no stage of the migration process is independent of what happened on the previous stage, affecting how terrorism and migration interact. It is shown that terrorism may be a trigger of migration in the origin country, that only particular selections of migrants choose to leave a country, and that these migrants then sort into different destinations. The role of migration governance as a means to avoid the influx of potential terrorists is explored as well as the responses of destination-country populations and governments to the threat of imported terrorism. In addition, homegrown terrorism produced in immigrant communities is discussed as well as political violence directed against immigrants. Finally, it is argued that there are feedback effects from diasporas on the origin countries of immigrants.

The Introduction outlines the role of Syrian intellectuals in shaping meaning around the 2011 revolution and its aftermath. It traces how early hope and discursive agency among intellectuals gave way to political fragmentation, repression, and exile, leading many to reassess their roles. It explores how exiled intellectuals engaged in a war of ideas, navigating pressures from authoritarian regimes, shifting public expectations, and host society constraints. Drawing on cultural sociology, intellectual positioning, and social movement theory, the Introduction situates Syrian intellectuals within global debates on public intellectualism, examining how political upheaval transforms their influence. The book investigates how exiled intellectuals’ work – once invested in revolutionary hope – became dominated by trauma narration, reshaping their discursive impact but weakening political efficacy. Through qualitative research, it examines how their meaning-making processes evolved, with broader implications for intellectuals in failed, or stalled, revolutionary movements.

This chapter introduces the Greek concept of stasis, which is the term archaic and classical authors most frequently apply to episodes of regime-threatening political violence. It also reviews existing scholarship on the nature of stasis; describes the elements and dynamics that are typical of stasis; defines this commonly misunderstood term; and introduces a set of criteria designed to enable accurate diagnosis of as many staseis as possible, allow for consistent implementation in a broad range of historical and evidentiary contexts, map onto fifth- and fourth-century understandings of stasis as closely as possible, and ensure that, when departures from that emic understanding are necessary, they are implemented in a way that strengthens the validity of the results obtained in Chapters 2–12.