This chapter examines belief in misinformation during the Coalition air war against ISIL in Iraq. In particular, it investigates a unique nationwide survey of contemporary Iraq that measures Iraqis’ factual perceptions about the Coalition airstrikes against ISIL, as well as whether they have lived under ISIL rule where the vast majority of strikes actually occurred. Moreover, this survey is paired with geo-located event data on the Coalition airstrikes themselves obtained from Airwars in order to measure the respondents’ proximity to the events more directly. Overall, the results reveal that Iraqis’ factual misperceptions about Coalition actions are widespread – fueled by both their own preexisting political orientations and streams of information in the dispute – but that civilians with greater personal exposure to the campaign are much less likely to embrace these falsehoods. Indeed, both experience living under ISIL control and proximity to the airstrikes themselves significantly reduce factual misperceptions about the Coalition’s aerial campaign, including false claims about its targeting of Shiʿa Arab-led militias and its strategic benefits to ISIL.

This chapter focuses on a selection of recipes included in Byzantine alchemical and pharmacological compendia that are preserved in manuscripts dating between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries: MSS Parisinus gr. 2314, Bononiensis 1808, and Vaticanus gr. 1174. These manuscripts represent important case studies that are compared with similar collections, from late antique medical encyclopaedias to Byzantine alchemical writings and Nicholas Myrepsos’ pharmaceutical handbook. Through an in-depth analysis of the contents and the terminology of these works, I track the transformation of their technical vocabulary, focusing on cross-cultural exchanges between the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin traditions. Byzantine authors and copyists reshaped and ‘updated’ a long-lasting technical tradition deeply rooted in late antique and early Byzantine writings, which continued to be read and commented on during the Palaiolοgan period, when scholars compiled large selections of formulas and prescriptions belonging to different, yet overlapping fields, such as metallurgy, pharmacology, and cuisine.

Protest in the face of authoritarian rule necessitates a kind of audacity rarely, if ever, called for in daily life. When uprising turns to revolt and revolt to civil war, new questions arise: What comes next? What combination of suffering and joy does the future hold? And to whom should one now turn to manage those matters previously entrusted to the state? Even as new political possibilities arise, the stuff of ordinary life does not disappear but instead must be managed on terms that are both newly expansive and constrained. As people confront the hopes and hardships that come with rebellion, bread must be baked, crimes punished, and garbage collected.

As the Syrian uprising took a violent turn, armed fighters and civilian leaders alike carved out insurgent micropolitical economies across the country’s contested territories. Raqqa City was the first provincial capital to fall from the regime’s control into the hands of opposition forces. The city elected its first opposition council, the Raqqa city council, in early 2014, but the council proved short-lived. By mid-2014, a zealous band of foreign fighters had consolidated control over the city with the aim of establishing a caliphate that would transcend the Westphalian state system and manifest an extreme vision of Islamic rule. These aspiring governors quickly established a monopoly over coercion and availed themselves of a range of capital assets through access to natural resources, looting, and various forms of taxation in the service of their state-building effort. Our close reading of accounts from the city of Raqqa between 2014 and 2016 revealed the corresponding emergence of tight forms of social control as well as the demonstrated capacity to deliver a wide array of key services. In these ways, the so-called Islamic State proved to be a paragon of rebel governance, mobilizing key forms of material power to erect a robust new political order.

This chapter traces the translocal dynamics in the exercise of religion on the Greek island of Delos, one of the eminent hot-spots of global connectivity in the Hellenistic world. Stainhauer argues that the local population, among many foreigners and immigrants, shaped their lived environment through various processes of cultural brokerage: by developing genuinely local cults such as that of Apollo, Zeus, and Athena Kynthios; by introducing new cults, sometimes upon the initiative of individuals or associations from away; and third, by locally appropriating global cults, for instance that of Isis and Serapis. Combining these dimensions, the people on Delos crafted a religious pluriverse that was moulded and tied to the local specificities of their island.

This chapter traces the translocal dynamics in the exercise of religion on the Greek island of Delos, one of the eminent hot-spots of global connectivity in the Hellenistic world. Stainhauer argues that the local population, among many foreigners and immigrants, shaped their lived environment through various processes of cultural brokerage: by developing genuinely local cults such as that of Apollo, Zeus, and Athena Kynthios; by introducing new cults, sometimes upon the initiative of individuals or associations from away; and third, by locally appropriating global cults, for instance that of Isis and Serapis. Combining these dimensions, the people on Delos crafted a religious pluriverse that was moulded and tied to the local specificities of their island.

A great deal of international and domestic conflict is driven by feelings of humiliation. But what does political humiliation consist of? In this chapter I argue that a key part of political humiliation involves the sense of being replaced. After looking at several case studies including the rhetoric used by ISIS recruiters, the rise of revanchist Russian and Chinese foreign policies, and the language deployed by white supremacists to frame and justify their grievances, I point to some features of the sense of replacement. These include the loss of status and perceived break of a promise or denial of an entitlement – both coupled with a reactionary brand of nostalgia that aims to return the world to how things were before these losses occurred. Part 1 introduces the idea of humiliation in international and domestic conflict. Part 2 uses four case studies to suggest that replacement is key in making sense of political humiliation. Part 3 offers several reasons why it’s particularly important to understand the dynamics of replacement.

The influence which Plato’s theories of eros and philia exerted on Plutarch’s Advice to a Bride and Groom, On Isis and Osiris and his Dialogue on Love (Erotikos/Amatorius) are examined in light of the enormous chronological, cultural and philosophical distance between Plato and Plutarch. Plutarch’s methodological approach, reconciling his own opinions with the diverse views – which he saw as authoritative – expressed by Plato in the Symposium, Phaedrus and Laws, is considered. In his Advice to a Bride and Groom, Plutarch’s presentation of a philosophically informed love within marriage is presented as a counterpart to the early stages of Plato’s lover. Similarly, On Isis and Osiris, also presents a ‘companionate marriage’. However, the Erōtikos is the most important Plutarchan work dealing with Platonic love. Here Plutarch must prove not only that married love is natural, and homosexual love against nature (though he does not condemn it as a general principle), but also that women are worthy of love, and, if not already virtuous, can through the influence of the lover be brought towards virtue. The extent to which Plutarch rewrites the Platonic dialogues on eros in a new way, set in the imperial Roman world, is demonstrated.

Chapter 7 focuses on the two entities most often considered instances of revolutionary state formation after 2011 and which came into conflict with one another: the ISIS caliphate founded across Syria and Iraq, on the one hand, and the autonomous cantons ruled by the Kurdish PYD party in ‘Rojava’, or the Kurdish areas of north-eastern Syria, on the other. The chapter acknowledges that in attempting to create new forms of state – ‘democratic confederalism’ in the case of Rojava, and a Sunni Caliphate in the case of ISIS – these instances do resemble previous cases of revolutionary transformation. Yet their relationship with the revolutionary uprisings of 2011 is more complicated. In the case of ISIS, the chapter demonstrates that the caliphate is better thought of as a form of counter-revolution against that uprising, while in Rojava the PYD maintained an ambiguous relationship with the regime against which it was directed. For both the PYD and ISIS, international intervention proved decisive as the former were able to ally with the United States to defeat the latter – only then to suffer Turkish invasion once US support was withdrawn.

Chapter 3 examines a double paradox with regards to ISIS and fear: first, that ISIS beheadings are a spectacle, while at the same time, there exists an image ban on viewing these images, and second, that ISIS is both inherently known as a threat, yet also fundamentally unknowable. It uses the framing of the Bilderverbot, the secularized image ban of biblical origin, to examine how beheadings are represented as unrepresentable, and how this paradox enters into normalcy. The chapter tells the story of two beheadings: one of an Iraqi head and one of a Western one. The first is shown but not seen, and the latter is seen but not shown. A micro-level examination of the severed head image allows these stories to emerge. The first account, concerning the severed head of an Iraqi man working as an informant for American soldiers, allows for an examination of how beheadings are often depicted in the language of horror, or as an example of “body horror.” The second story, the story of ISIS beheadings, is one in which the severed head has become a fact of international politics and in which fear of ISIS beheadings is taken for granted.

Competition is commonplace among militant groups. Although political scientists have begun recognizing its importance, they lag behind other fields in the general study of competition. This is critical due to the strategic depth that competition brings. How one group behaves affects another group, and vice versa. Moreover, target governments and international organizations can manipulate the environment in which the groups must then interact. This chapter argues that building models to examine these issues is a useful strategy, but that the literature on political violence has not yet explored the implications. We then set the stage for the results we develop throughout the book.

In the winter of 2016 I partook in a tour of the front lines facing the Dawla al Islamia, the Islamic State, in northern Iraq. Two years earlier ISIS had burst on to the world stage and conquered vast swathes of territory in a now borderless region known as ‘Syraq’. In 2014, Iraq alone suffered a third of the world’s terrorism fatalities. But not all these deaths came at the hands of ISIS or its predecessor ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’. With Sunni ISIS garnering attention as the world’s most deadly terrorist group, less attention has been paid to the terror campaign carried out by Shiite groups that was launched, in part, as a response to the terror campaign by Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and ISIS. Many observers who commented on this wave of terrorism described the spectacular rise of ISIS in 2012–14 and emergence of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite terrorist groups as coming ‘out of the blue’. But there was a long and rarely studied prehistory to the rise of terrorism in this land that begins with the 2003 US–British invasion of this secular, Baathist-dominated country that had previously served as ‘firewall’ against both Shiite and Sunni sectarian radicalism. An understanding of this background history and the role of 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom in opening the Pandora’s box of sect-based terrorism in Iraq is crucial to explaining the origins, goals, tactics and local and global impact of the terrorists operating in this land.