This chapter shows that violence today sows the seeds of future fighting through a series of vicious cycles. First, it is stressed that persistent poverty creates vicious cycles of deprivation and disputes. Namely, poverty provides the breeding ground for violence, as the lack of income and perspectives makes it relatively more appealing to join armed rebellion. This, in turn, further impoverishes the country. Secondly, wars tear apart the social fabric of society, which in turn hinders postconflict reconstruction. Put differently, hate and distrust in the aftermath of fighting often trigger revenge wars further down the road. The third vicious cycle studied concerns education, with low human capital fueling fighting and subsequent wars destroying schools. Last but not least, this chapter discusses the impact of war trauma on future crime propensity. These various vicious cycles are illustrated with the help of a series of historical examples, spanning Peru, Angola and Uganda to Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Switzerland. This discussion highlights the crucial importance of fostering peace right now, which leads to a powerful peace multiplier.

This chapter deals with all manner of state-derived prohibitions. Ancient states prohibited a broad variety of behaviours, threatening punishment for those who would transgress boundaries. The logic of prohibition was wide-ranging: from the marking of spaces, objects and officials as somehow distinct from the rest of ‘society’, leading factions within ancient states sought to preserve and protect their individual prerogatives. They also sought to reinforce their claims to leadership by incentivizing subjects to settle their disputes in state-sanctioned venues. The evidence for such prohibitions is extensive, but did they add up to something that we might legitimately call ‘social control’? Did ancient states succeed at inducing subject populations to accept their claims to rule? If so, how? This chapter suggests that the logic of prohibition was a site of contestation for both statecraft and subject-craft.

Through the energetic work of the reformer John Calvin, the small city-state of Geneva became the so-called Protestant Rome in the sixteenth century. Calvin created a morals court, the Consistory, which worked in conjunction with the city council to attack a wide range of ‘sins’, including illicit sexuality, defined as all sexual activity outside of marriage. In Calvin’s time, authorities pursued male and female fornicators (including fiancés) with the same rigour and on rare occasions sentenced adulterers to death. After Calvin’s death a double standard appeared in the treatment of adultery, most blatant in the fact that sexual relations between female servants and their married masters resulted in more severe penalties for the former than the latter. Same-sex relations were considered crimes against nature, but authorities adjudged those involving men much more severely than those involving women, probably based on a belief that sexual relations between male partners degraded them to the level of women. Although a few men were prosecuted for rape, religious and political authorities largely enhanced patriarchy; given the persistent numbers of people who were summoned, they clearly were also less successful in nurturing self-control among Genevans in their sex lives than in other areas of behaviour.

The chapter views automatism in the light of the Victorian emphasis on the value of free will and individual responsibility. Daily life involved repeated practical synthesis of contradictory judgments about the determined, or automatic, and moral sources of action. Criminal court cases in which there was a defense of insanity exemplified the issues at stake in relating the disordered brain and the moral will. In the Victorian period, medical experts began to play a large part in legal judgments about insanity and criminal responsibility, and they articulated evidence for the involuntary, or automatic, form of insane actions. Public interest in these issues preceded and informed debate about automatism in philosophy and science. The chapter uses a spectacular 1854 case of multiple child murder by the children’s mother to shape discussion of the wider issues. The case both shows the complexity of social issues touching on automatism and offers insight into the imagination that accompanied Victorian fears about automatism replacing free will.

Positive and negative aspects of meritocracy are evaluated, together with the difficulties of realizing it in practice. The notion and the theory of networks are recalled. White (fully legal, socially useful), gray (legal, but morally doubtful) and black (illegal) networks are distinguished. Various examples of networks are considered: the family, associations (cultural, religious, political, sports etc.), mason lodges (among the grey networks) including a deviant secret lodge as the P2 in Italy (the nature of which is illustrated), criminal clans and mafia-type associations (a synthetic history of the mafia is provided).

Analyzes the acquittal of Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial, detailing the reasons given by senators who voted to convict and acquit, and advances lessons from the acquittal.

Describes the Senate trial of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, with detailed analysis of the procedural maneuvers by Trump’s defenders and accusers, the role of the Chief Justice in the trial, and the arguments of the House Managers and Trump’s counsel.

Outlines the political career of Bill Clinton and his rise to the presidency in the post-Watergate era, as well as the corresponding rise of his wife, Hillary Clinton. Addresses the altered political climate of the period and how the actions of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr elevated President Clinton’s inexcusable moral turpitude into impeachable conduct.

This chapter probes the mobilization of liberated Africans, convicts, slaves, and vagrants to build the Casa de Correção between 1834 and 1850. Drawing from research on how modernizing political elites developed administrative, technical, and identification technologies to render peripatetic peoples legible for the purpose of taxation and labor control, the chapter investigates how the construction of the Casa de Correção evolved into a project of legibility to regulate the effects of the campaign against human trafficking. Through its punitive and labor discipline roles, the penitentiary evolved into an important site of racialization of the poor along cleavages that assigned differentiated treatment by legal status – slave or free – and ethnic origins – European immigrants, Brazilians, or Africans. The penitentiary reinforced existing divisions in Brazilian society between slaves and free, foreigners and nationals, while blurring the lines of distinctions among these categories through the regime of labor and confinement.

Gun violence is a public health crisis. In 2020, America had the highest number of deaths due to gun violence on record. Gun violence and stabbings were the second and fifth causes of violence-related deaths in the United States, respectively. There were 45,222 gun deaths in the United States, with suicide comprising 54% and homicides comprising 43% of those deaths. While 30% of American adults report owning a gun, 52% of non-gun owners could see themselves owning a gun in the future. Urban areas are particularly affected by gun violence. In 2015, 81% of the 12,979 firearm homicides that occurred in the US occurred in cities. In the urban trauma setting, penetrating trauma disproportionately impacts the pre-existing violence in these areas. During the COVID-19 global pandemic, emergency departments have seen a rise in trauma admissions. This exacerbation of violence may correlate with the economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher poverty rates in these areas contribute to the crime and increased prevalence of penetrating injury. This upsurge of trauma is particularly salient in urban hospital settings, where there is a concentration of violent injuries.

More than one in ten lecturers in the Tasman World also served as lay preachers or clergyman, with Methodists particularly represented. Sometimes they occupied both roles at once as scientific men of the cloth. At other times, one identity slid away as another formed. Such preachers were almost all men, owing to the gendered nature of pulpit and platform. The configurations of authority that they navigated are best studied from the fissures revealed by court cases or scandals. In 1893, Wesleyan minister Ralph Brown benefited from gender and class advantages when charged with indecently assaulting a teenage girl after mesmerising her. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert James Abbott, nurseryman, practical phrenologist and leader of Melbourne’s Free Christian Assembly, faced allegations related to perceived scientific powers. Layered authority helped these men to recover from the rubble of their excesses. Popular science proved a resilient safety net when God departed.