Primary party organisations were key engines driving the complex process through which mass repression spread across the USSR, providing the institutional framework in which the social tensions of the mid-1930s could become entangled with the political initiatives of the leadership. PPO records thus offer a unique vantage point for following the gradual transformation of ordinary, if tense, social conflict into a lethal political crisis. They also demonstrate the significant extent to which the party rank-and-file remained a distinct actor deriving its understanding of the repressions from its own lived experience as filtered through its political outlook, in this way placing its own mark on events. In industry, this experience consisted primarily of workplace conditions and the permanently tense relations between workers and managers.

Normally, treaties contain express provision on duration and termination. These can take a variety of forms, including indefinite duration with a right to terminate, or a conditional right to terminate. Various types of clauses are examined, together with the situation where a treaty contains no provision for termination or withdrawal. A treaty may also be terminated by consent or by conclusion of a later treaty. The chapter examines the relationship between treaty provisions and countermeasures, and analyses the right of one or more parties to terminate or suspend a treaty for material breach. It also examines other grounds for termination, including supervening impossibility of performance and fundamental change of circumstances (rebus sic stantibus), the procedure for termination, and special circumstances such as the severance of diplomatic relations or outbreak of hostilities.

The book’s final chapter is a nuanced study of how political screening engaged with and altered German memory, identity, and community, as well as the national process of coming to terms with the Nazi past. This research challenges the traditional single-frame interpretation of denazification by revealing how many respondents, especially those complicit with Nazism, actively used political screening for their own benefit. It views the questionnaire as a rich and revealing record of autobiography. The emotional annotations written into Fragebögen are a window into the mind of the common German citizen and a means to understand individual mental processing of the Nazi era. This chapter argues that men and women undergoing political investigation were not passive subjects of a mandatory denazification program, but active and engaged participants who used the questionnaire, consciously and subconsciously, for their own benefit. The Fragebogen was therefore not simply a bureaucratic screening instrument of the occupying armies, but also an unintended emancipatory device that gave voice to Germans, inviting them to participate in the determination of their own fate.

The means of detection determined investigation and interrogation practices. Conspiratorial networks and targeted minorities were vulnerable to surveillance and infiltration in ways that society was not. Distinct groups with organized structures could be mapped to uncover organized resistance. Policing criticism was sisyphean by comparison. Blanket surveillance was neither realistic nor desirable. Practically, general suspicion threatened popular support. Ideologically, the police were to cooperate with racial comrades. Faced with limited resources and an impossible task, the Gestapo relied on Germans to denounce opponents in their midst. The Party played an integral role to this end. On the one hand, it screened accusations and channeled reports to the Gestapo. On the other, its officials reported a fifth of critics and encouraged others to do the same. These intermediaries dismissed minor offences, yet the Gestapo ultimately relied on denouncers with mixed motives. Highly questionable evidence documented potentially serious incidents. The Gestapo investigated critics thoroughly and cautiously as a result.

Until recently, historians were agreed that European societies welcomed the outbreak of the Great War with near-ecstatic enthusiasm. In support of this view they could point to newspaper reports and to photographs of festive crowds thronging the streets of the belligerent states’ capital cities. The consensus was also reinforced by politicians, who in their memoirs described August 1914 as a sequence of completely spontaneous patriotic manifestations that practically forced leaders to go on the offensive. The streets of Paris, London, St Petersburg, and Berlin were indeed filled with joyous crowds cheering their leaders and denouncing their enemies, and as they did so, young men reported to recruiting stations. Serried ranks of students strode along Berlin’s Unter den Linden, singing as they went. The participants and observers of those events had a sense that the whole nation was united in a common purpose.

This chapter focuses on the treaty procedures that apply to the types of withdrawal and termination that are most commonly handled in Treaty Offices, rather than the details of all the legal rules that could theoretically be invoked in a treaty dispute. It examines modes of unilateral and agreed termination of bilateral treaties, unilateral and agreed withdrawal from a multilateral treaty, and types of termination of multilateral treaties. It then turns to the issues of continuing obligations after the ending of treaty relations and domestic procedures for treaty withdrawals and terminations.

Force itself is not as straightforward as it might at first appear. Stealth proved a communicative endeavour; Chapter 7 shows that force is too. What does force intend to communicate in the context of armed conservation and acquisitive politics? Who is the intended audience? What values underlie the actors’ moves? Pisteurs often use the idiom of vengeance to answer those questions, or that of why they pursue manhunts. But vengeance invites further exploration, too. It has often been thought of as a mode of law, a balancing mechanism. Vengeance, in the way in which pisteurs, hunters, and herders enact it, in contrast, is a means of communicating a claim to status. Who is not to be messed with? Who can be subjected to seizure or other insults? How does one respond if attacked? Recourse to vengeance is particularly valuable to people who do not have reliable access to institutional means of protection; it is a mode of denunciation, and a claim to sovereignty, oriented not towards control but towards liberty. Denunciation, like vengeance, is conversational – only in rare cases is it so definitive as to become a Parthian shot, and instead it often becomes a continuing cycle. Few are happy that denunciation is so prevalent, but many see their own denunciations as necessary. By denouncing, they claim an exception from violence that would demean but not include them, as well as from associated rules and norms, and as such it is a process of solidarity and claiming liberty.