Drawing on research on electoral violence in multiparty Ghana and party-sponsored conflict during Turkey’s 1976 to 1980 anarşi crisis, this chapter evaluates the alternative argument of democratic longevity as a potential explanation or party violence. It thus probes the generalizability of the book’s main arguments and helps to extend its cross-regional scope.

This chapter details the book’s theoretical model, focusing first on elites’ decisions and then on voters’ reactions. It highlights how expected party lifespan stands to impact leaders’ decision-making about violence by shortening or lengthening their time horizons. Politicians operating with truncated time horizons will display a higher propensity for organizing or sponsoring party conflict than their counterparts with lengthy time horizons. The chapter thus holds that the effect of party instability on elite choice is conditioning rather than determinative. While unstable parties do not cause violence, they can incentivize elites to engineer or sponsor violence in certain contexts.

How does environmental displacement fuel violent conflict? Worldwide environmental violence uproots more people every year than war, and the alarming acceleration of environmental displacement has generated significant speculation about its security consequences. This chapter undertakes a review of the literature linking environmental migration and violent conflict to: (1) map the complex causal pathways linking environmental migration to the onset and dynamics of political violence; (2) evaluate the “state of the evidence” or available empirical support underlying claims of an environment-migration-conflict link; and (3) identify gaps in existing literature. By systematizing existing research, this chapter seeks to clarify the state of knowledge on the environment-migration-conflict nexus, identify points of consensus and debate, and chart a path forward for future research. The review finds that while existing research suggests environmental displacement fuels civil war and communal conflict, there is a dearth of research addressing how environmental migrants may experience violence at the hands of the state. In addition, more comparative research is needed to gain deeper insights into the conditions under which environmental displacement impacts political violence.

In 1998, 7 weeks after the Good Friday Agreement was endorsed, a car bomb exploded in Omagh in County Tyrone, killing 29 adults and children and two unborn babies. The local health and social care trust mobilised resources to create a comprehensive mental health response to the care needs of the victims and survivors. This service was evidence based, outcomes focused, and research orientated, and contributed to the international evidence base through a series of research studies that helped to inform the further development of the Ehlers and Clark model of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma-focused CBT approaches to treatment, and the developing concept of complex grief. The response led directly to creating a regionalised psychological trauma managed care network for Northern Ireland in an innovative approach of co-production (the Regional Trauma Network) and informed the implementation of a recognition scheme for victims and survivors (the Troubles Permanent Disablement Payment Scheme).

This chapter provides multiple examples of politically motivated hostility and violence in the U.S and four European multi-party systems. It also provides an introduction to the book and its content.

Scholars often frame Republican supporters in 1860 as the moral center of American politics. The Republicans, after all, were antislavery proponents, at least in a moderate sense. But it is important not to infuse Republican Party morality with a more modern ethic, such as an antiracist or antiviolence stance. Most Republicans focused on White enslavers and the institution of slavery without developing much policy on freed slaves beyond colonization - the removal of African Americans from the United States. Despite the Republican Party’s self-promotion as a coalition committed to peaceful law and order (in contrast to the bullying leadership of slaveholders and Democrats), it was an organization built to resist and fight. In the 1860 election cycle, the Wide Awakes, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican backers, engaged their Democratic counterparts in physical battle across the northern, urban landscape. Shootings, stabbings, chasings, and beatings marked these clashes. Chapter 6 explores how partisan physical and electoral fights would shape questions of violence and the national state in the challenging period between Lincoln’s election and his assumption of office.

Chapter five, “The Time of War,” shifts the level of analysis from the system to interstate relations, focusing on the issue that arguably produced the discipline itself – war. It establishes that war is an intrinsically temporal concept, an event, and requires a number of contestable ideas to be resolved in a specific way in order to cohere in its contemporary form. It shows how ideas like heterotemporal coherence, temporal fluidity, and the production of temporal borders are constitutive elements of war that must be theorized. War requires a collective imaginary to even exist – otherwise, it is just a group of individuals engaged in lethal force. Attending to the temporal levels of analysis within and among these imaginaries as well as resisting the epistemological privileging of generalizability is vital to a better understanding of it. Our understanding of war is largely dependent on which presents are being analyzed, rather than the produce of timeless, objective mechanisms or objectively analogous situations.

On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian heir presumptive, Franz Ferdinand. By killing the archduke (and his wife), Princip set in motion the well-oiled wheels that would, just a month later, lead to the outbreak of what George F. Kennan called “the great seminal catastrophe of [the twentieth] century,”1 the First World War. It resulted in the demise of most European monarchies and empires, and – by extension – triggered the next two global conflicts, the Second World War and the Cold War. Princip was a member of the secret Serbian society the “Black Hand,” which had grown in response to the illegal occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908. He shot Franz Ferdinand to intimidate Austria-Hungary so that it would let go of Bosnia and Herzegovina.2 This assassination demonstrates how terrorism and nationalism can be intertwined and how potent and destructive this mix can be.

This chapter captures and closely analyzes the multiplicity of narratives developed by designated Gang of Four followers purged from the regime following the end of the Cultural Revolution. The CCP authorities have labeled these so-called followers as “perpetrators” of the Cultural Revolution. Using oral histories, the chapter shows how those officially labeled as “perpetrators” rarely and only indirectly portray themselves as such; more often they see themselves as victims or even heroes. The chapter further illustrates how the party-state has never been able to silence alternative voices on the Cultural Revolution within society, nor can it addresses the issue of responsibility for past violence by categorizing perpetrators and victims, two categories that are often confronted with a complex reality. The chapter argues that the processes of punishing perpetrators in post-Cultural Revolution China, or the absence thereof, have continued to influence the way the past is remembered and not remembered in present Chinese society.

Chapter 6 examines how the reasons for persecution are applied and interpreted by appellate authorities when individuals flee contemporary armed conflicts. It claims that due to appellate authorities’ conventional warfare perspective and the requirement of singling out and heightened standard of proof, there is limited judicial engagement with the Refugee Convention reasons in light of widespread violence. Instead, the Refugee Convention reasons for persecution are applied solely in light of the individual circumstances of appellants where these are considered to amount to singling out. Accordingly, there is a general failure to adequately consider actual or imputed Refugee Convention reasons for persecution. Where appellate authorities find that appellants have been singled out, they interpret the Refugee Convention ground of (imputed) political opinion too narrowly and fail to acknowledge women’s experiences of gendered violence. The chapter argues that violence is in fact motivated by identity politics on the basis of real or imputed reasons such as sex, ethnicity, race, religion, political opinion or social group and that therefore violence is not felt indiscriminately by persons fleeing armed conflicts. The chapter highlights the significance of imputed political opinion as a Refugee Convention ground in light of the nature of political violence and discrimination.