The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

In August 1945, almost all southerners in Vietnam opposed the French and supported the Viet Minh. By the end of 1947, however, this coalition was in tatters. Mekong Delta politics fractured along ethnic and political lines. This chapter looks at the "priming" phase of this violence in 1945 and 1946. It distinguishes sharply between the development of a political fracturing among Vietnamese groups, on the one hand, and of a second, less-noticed development: the ethnic split between Vietnamese and Khmer. The chapter looks at the intervention of France, including the French military, from October 1945 onwards, emphasizing their weakness and unpreparednesss. It examines the challenges facing the Viet Minh, including its contentious relations with the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao politico-religious groups. Discusses the common use of violence, including killing, against perceived traitors.

The first chapter introduces blame games as distinct political events characterized by a conflictual style of politics that is different from routine politics. It conceptualizes blame games as litmus tests that allow the understanding of how political systems change and function when they switch into ‘conflict mode’. This chapter then provides a glimpse of the institutionalized forms of conflict management that Western democracies have developed to deal with policy controversies. It goes on to argue that blame games are context-sensitive political events that require a comprehensive but parsimonious framework to study them across institutional and issue contexts. The chapter concludes with a chapter overview and a short presentation of the strategy of inquiry and data used.

In Chapter 14, we turn to civil conflict, where the main protagonists are located within a political community. Scale is usually a background condition of little theoretical significance, and scholars have made little effort to theorize its impact on conflict. We begin by presenting a theory of why scale might have a curvilinear effect on civil conflict. While scale decreases social cohesion within a community, and also negatively affects the likelihood of a decisive military victory, it enhances the power of a jurisdiction, decreasing the likelihood that opposition groups will take up arms. We argue that the relationship is likely to be curvilinear because positive scale effects on civil conflict should attenuate quickly while negative scale effects seem likely to continue to grow indefinitely. We proceed to test this theory using a new measure of battlefield casualties, which tracks the number of battle deaths in countries around the world from 1946 to 2009. Our results show that increases in scale enhance conflict, but only up to a certain point. After this inflection point, increases in population are associated with decreases in conflict, proxied by battlefield casualties.

This chapter examines the West Frankish political controversies that defined Flodoard’s career and reassesses the nature of the historian’s involvement in them. Between 925 and 961, the see of Rheims was contested by two archbishops in a dispute that was intrinsically linked with wider political struggles in West Francia. Even though Flodoard tells us about his own participation in the archiepiscopal dispute, previous scholars have downplayed this involvement, considering it to have had little impact on his historical works. This chapter scrutinises Flodoard’s autobiographical remarks and portraits of the two rival archbishops, Hugh and Artold, arguing that his role in the dispute did have a significant bearing on the content and tone of his Annals and History of the Church of Rheims. The History, moreover, has tended to be viewed as a passive work of ‘local history’ primarily of benefit for the clergy of Rheims. Yet Flodoard composed it immediately following the resolution of the Rheims schism. By reappraising the nature of this settlement and Flodoard’s impetuses for writing, this chapter advances a broader interpretation of the purpose and audience of his History.

compares cosmopolitan vs communitarian issue positions of national, European and global elites. It is important to go beyond the national elite focus since the prototypical members of a cosmopolitan elite are thought to be no longer attached to one national context but to have an entire region or even the ‘global village’ as their point of reference. Our empirical analysis supports this expectation: The positions of European-level elites turn out to be even more strongly cosmopolitan than those of national elites, which indicates that a particularly large gap exists between the cosmopolitanism of European elites and the more communitarian orientation of mass publics. Cultural explanations - measured by embeddedness in transnational networks - have the greatest explanatory power. Those elites who have more transnational contacts and travel experience are more cosmopolitan with regard to trade, immigration and supranational integration. However, economic explanations help us to explain within-elite variance in cosmopolitanism. In particular, we find that business and labour union elites diverge strongly in their positions on international trade and supranational integration.

This chapter presents the theoretical framework and research design of the book. Drawing on cleavage theory, we argue that the new fault lines around globalization can no longer be captured along the classic redistributional left-right axis. From debates in political philosophy, we infer a distinction between ‘cosmopolitans’, who advocate open borders, universal norms, and supranational authority, and ‘communitarians’, who defend border closure, cultural particularism and national sovereignty. We also distinguish two hybrid positions, which we label ‘liberal nationalism’ and ‘regionalism’. In terms of processes of social structuration underlying conflicts related to globalization, we distinguish three explanations: an economic one, centred around the differential materials costs and benefits for various collective actors; a cultural one, centred around access to transnational cultural capital and a political one that captures the differing degree to which actors have access to supranational forums of decision-making. Finally, we introduce the book’s research design, the rationale behind the choice of countries and issues, and the main methods used to investigate them.

offers a comprehensive analysis of political claims-making in the age of globalization, investigating issue positions of collective actors across countries and polity levels and distinguishing between economic, cultural and political dimensions of globalization. The cultural dimension is centred on migration, human rights and climate change, and the economic dimension is centred on international trade. Positions on political globalization vary between NAFTA members Mexico and the USA, where it is a trade issue, and EU members Germany and Poland, where it is part of the cultural dimension. Global actors (mostly NGOs and UN orgs) take cosmopolitan positions. Among domestic actors there is a marked differentiation between predominantly cosmopolitan executive and administrative state actors and experts, and legislative and civil society actors with more strongly communitarian leanings. On trade and regional integration issues, we find more classic economic-interest explanations. Here, labour unions and farmers are found on the communitarian side, whereas business associations and representatives of large firms strongly favour free international trade and regional integration.