This chapter summarizes the maximum sentences available to domestic courts around the world for the perpetration of acts of terrorism. In more than one-quarter of all States this includes the death penalty. The chapter then describes the prosecution of terrorism suspects in selected domestic courts across the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. It considers the reasonableness of the charges laid, the fairness of the trials, and the legitimacy of the sentences imposed upon conviction. Some of those prosecuted for terrorism offences are children or women. The overwhelming majority, though, are men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years.

Chapter 10 begins by summarising the conclusions from the case studies in terms of the model of ruler conversion, but its main aim is to adopt a global perspective on ruler conversions and on conversion more generally at times. It first underscores how vanishingly rare ruler conversions between Islam and Christianity are in the historical record and yet how open to monotheism immanentist regions, such as the Pacific and, to a lesser extent, Africa have been. Some scholars have already noticed the resilience of Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian societies to the proselytising drives of Christianity and Islam. The chapter summarises why this makes sense in terms of the mechanism of transcendentalist intransigence. It then offers a brief overview of how this affected Eurasian history by reference to the Ottoman, Mughal, Manchu and Mongol empires. The second half of the chapter offers a more detailed appraisal of the fortunes of Christianity and Islam in attempting to secure ruler conversions in South Asia, East Asia and both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia. Even though missionaries developed some of their most sophisticated strategies in these regions, the result was largely a failure. The conclusion to the chapter, and the book, reflects on the role of culture and the question of scale in historical analysis.

This chapter works to historicize and materialize a family of ritualized practices (molk-style rites) related to the burnt offering of perinatal infants, their deposition in a sanctuary space (conventionally dubbed “tophets”), and the dedication of carved-stone monuments alongside the deposits. Instead of religious permanence or diffusion, it argues for four moments, each with distinctive dynamics, that led communities to embrace these rites. First, between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE, these rites were tied to Phoenician colonization; then, between the fourth and second centuries BCE, the adoption of molk-style rites was tied to migration from these colonial centers. But in the long first century BCE, the boom in molk-style rites was instead tied to the creation of a new, interconnected civic elite in the space between Numidian kingdoms and the Roman province of Africa. Finally, in the second and third centuries CE, migrations related to the Roman army drove the foundation of new sanctuaries to Saturn where stelae (and often molk-style offerings) were dedicated. Stele-sanctuaries were deeply entangled with the power dynamics and institutions of empire.

The concluding chapter reflects on how re-materializing worship and elevating a plurality of localized little pictures over the colonial big picture of Africa in antiquity can contribute to decolonizing North African studies. The chapter synthesizes evidence for how stelae participated in and shaped changing worship practices, and how these recursively reproduced imperial hegemony.

Chapter 3 focuses on some of the signifiers that have long been argued to provide proof for how Punic culture survived and persisted through molk-style rites, especially the “sign of Tanit,” the crescent, and terms like sufete. Instead of continuities, these signs were appropriated and visibly transformed by the new elite of the first century BCE. It was not meanings, significances, or interpretations that bound togther these worshippers from Mauretania to Tripolitania, but rather the signs themselves. Rather than veneers that can be dismissed as epiphenomena, signifiers had the power to create imagined communities, and they did so within a Third Space distinct from the markers of prestige embraced by Numidian kings and Roman authorities.

The new conceptualization of molk-style rites shown in Chapter 7 led to shifts in how sanctuaries were structured and in the entailments these new structures had for the communities who used them. While past studies have focused on the movement from open-air stele fields to monumental sanctuaries as evidence of “Romanization” or the creation of “Romano-African” temple-types, this chapter argues that these new built temples instead participated in wider civic-style practices of benefaction and spectacle in ways that sought to foreground sacrificer-benefector figures. At the end of the second century CE, a number of stele-sanctuaries were rebuilt in monumental forms that privileged central altars, the spectacle of animal offering, and dining. This shift in the spatial dimension of worship afforded new possibilities of practice and social ordering that closely resemble those of the wider imperial world, creating a “sacrificial compromise” where local forms of authority were predicated on being central to the pageantry of sacrifice.

Chapter 1 introduces the problems to which this book responds and proposes alternative pathways for understanding the archaeology of the Roman Empire. It shows how particular colonial ways-of-knowing continue to shape the stories told of North Africa’s people and their traditions of worship under the Roman Empire, setting these within the binary of “Romanization” or “resistance.” While approaches to the archaeology of other parts of the Roman Empire have begun to embrace New Materialism as a way of moving beyond “Romanization,” this chapter argues that semiotic approaches offer a more productive means of engaging with and explaining the material dimensions of imperial hegemony.

This chapter provides subnational evidence from Kenya’s Rift Valley and Coast Provinces to show how unstable parties have incentivized elites to organize and sponsor party violence in these places. It also incorporates additional subnational variables, including information on candidates’ anxieties over seats, demographic data, and fine-grained information on grievances to explain where, when, and how violence has been organized in the Rift Valley and Coast.

This chapter introduces the phenomenon of party violence, discusses the scope conditions and central arguments of the book, and offers a methodological justification for the distinct cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India. It also details the multiple data sources used to develop the book’s main claims as well as the subnational research sites investigated in both countries. Substantively, the chapter holds that party instability is an underappreciated factor in the broader instrumentalist literature on elites’ decision-making about conflict. It argues that instability matters because it can make the deployment of violence less costly and risky for politicians and thereby incentivize the production of recurring and severe conflict.