Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the book. I articulate, first, why it is useful to think in terms of social imaginaries, rather than alternative sociological concepts (such as paradigms or ideologies), for analysing social integration in modern societies. I then explore why, in modernity, it was imaginaries of prosperity that provided the most stable foundations for social integration. These imaginaries can bridge, I argue, the plurality of worldviews and identities, while at the same time play into modernity’s strengths, namely democracy and knowledge governance. However, any particular imaginary of prosperity can provide only a temporary foundation, because it will sooner or later produce too many problems and contradictions to continue fulfilling its integrative role. When such problems mount, imaginaries of prosperity become subject to their own dialectics, having to shift eventually between privatised and collective routes to prosperity. If, however, the pressures for change cannot be institutionalised through democratic channels, we have seen in the past – and are seeing again today – that illiberal and undemocratic tribal imaginaries may take hold, making identity (rather than prosperity) the main vector of politics.

A question not asked to this point in the study of genocide by all the scholars associated with this work in the various disciplines is whether or not there something inherent in the very social construction we call “religion” that lends itself, adapts itself, all-too-easily to those communities— both nation-states and non-nation-state actors—that perpetrate genocide, either in actuality or in potential? Thus, this contribution begins with something of a theoretical look-see vis-à-vis that nexus between religion and genocide by suggesting applicable definitions for both and further outlining the constituent factors of each. (NB: There are, in truth, uncomfortable similarities between religious groups and genocidal perpetrator groups which, to my understanding, have never been addressed or explored.) To further bolster my overall argument—that religion, however defined and understood, is a “participating factor” (my preferred term) in all genocides, both historically and contemporarily—a series of case studies, using Raphael Lemkin’s tri-partite division from his incomplete History of Genocide—Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern Times—are examined to determine whether my thesis holds.

This final chapter covers the events of 1983’s Gukurahundi operation, where Mugabe and his ruling party decided to launch the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade against dissidents in Matabeleland North and South provinces and the Midlands province. Reports of their activities started to be known by the British military and then Anglo-American diplomats by mid-February. The reception of reports, particularly of large numbers of civilian deaths by the Fifth Brigade, is discussed in terms of Anglo-American diplomats. Different diplomatic responses between the Americans and the British to the Gukurahundi are examined, although both agreed to avoid making an international issue out of the reports of large numbers of civilian deaths in a concerted effort. Diplomatic debates over how much Prime Minister Mugabe was responsible are also discussed, as is Mugabe’s attempts to rationalize his use of the Fifth Brigade against civilians. The final discussion revolves around the use of “tribalism” or ethnic conflict by Anglo-American diplomats to help justify their lack of protest to civilian killings by a government that was also receiving development aid funding and military training and aid during this period.

Chapter 6 focuses on Libya and Yemen, both cases in which the former ruling dictator was removed – and eventually in both cases killed – but the result was the fragmentation and near-collapse of the state accompanied by direct and competitive foreign military intervention. Although ‘tribalism’ is often presented as a common factor in producing this outcome in both states, the chapter presents a materialist account of the tribe: just as in the case of the sect, tribal identification and forms of mobilisation acquiring their importance from previous forms of political economy. In both Libya and Yemen, the inheritance of previous revolutions from above – Gaddafi’s in Libya, and the anti-monarchical and anti-colonial revolutions of the 1960s in North and South Yemen, respectively – also shaped the revolutionary-counter-revolutionary conflicts after 2011. Although the NATO campaign in Libya in 2011 has been taken as a paradigmatic case of humanitarian intervention, assimilating the uprising to mid-2000s US policies of ‘regime change’, this chapter demonstrates that in both Libya and Yemen counter-revolutionary external intervention has been much more substantial and consequential.

The Conclusion demonstrates how the tradition of thinking in terms of rhetorical relationships can illuminate a new problem – in this case, partisan polarization in the United States. The contemporary discourse around polarization casts it as a breakdown in the possibilities of persuasion. For the dominant accounts, the root causes of our polarized politics lie in human psychology and our evolutionary legacy, and to the extent that a solution is possible, it must involve a sweeping program of moral reform. By contrast, an approach grounded in rhetorical relationships would see the polarized citizen as engaged in a deficient, but self-protective, form of listening. Crucially, this listening is the counterpart of the algorithmic and demagogic rhetoric I discussed in the Introduction – deficient, but self-protective, forms of speaking. Just as speakers engaged in those rhetorical pathologies withdraw from the vulnerabilities attendant on speech, polarized citizens withdraw from the vulnerabilities attendant on listening. Just as those pathologies result from an excess of elite risk-aversion, polarized listening is self-defense against the risks and rigors of persuadability. Political “tribalism” is a justifiable response to a broken rhetorical bargain, a refusal to bear the burdens of persuadability under conditions of unmitigated political inequality.

The Ottomans and Safavids had different policies towards nomads, but in both states nomads played an important role. The Safavids retained a strong nomad presence in the army, with tribal structure in both army and administration, organizing their followers in oymaqs. When these threatened the power of the state, Iranians and slave soldiers were brought in as counterweight, but the oymaqs remained in place. The Ottomans attempted fuller control but had to grant considerable autonomy in regions far from the center: eastern Anatolia, the Syrian desert, and the Arabian Peninsula. Competition between the two states led to shifting borders, in which nomad tribal powers allied with one or another state. Thus a largely nomad buffer region developed, stretching from Kurdistan to the Persian Gulf. Especially in Iran, the eighteenth century was a period of decentralization, when nomad tribes gained in power. This chapter discusses the lifestyle of nomads, for which sources are fuller at this period, and the role of firearms relative to nomad power.

This chapter analyzes the rhetoric and propaganda used by both supporters and opponents of these four regimes. Arguments for and against their sovereign claims formed a distinctive discursive web that defined the unique ideological shape of these contests. The types of argument in support of their sovereign claims are grouped into three broad argument families, which thematically divide the chapter. These were: (1) arguments articulating their authentic natures and the inauthenticity of their nationalist rivals, (2) arguments trumpeting their pro-Western orientations, and finally (3) arguments about how these pseudo-states’ sovereign claims favorably compared against legal states in Africa. This chapter will provide a broad framework to categorize the varied rhetorical and symbolic contests described in more detail in the chapters that follow.

This final chapter covers the events of 1983’s Gukurahundi operation, where Mugabe and his ruling party decided to launch the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade against dissidents in Matabeleland North and South provinces and the Midlands province. Reports of their activities started to be known by the British military and then Anglo-American diplomats by mid-February. The reception of reports, particularly of large numbers of civilian deaths by the Fifth Brigade, is discussed in terms of Anglo-American diplomats. Different diplomatic responses between the Americans and the British to the Gukurahundi are examined, although both agreed to avoid making an international issue out of the reports of large numbers of civilian deaths in a concerted effort. Diplomatic debates over how much Prime Minister Mugabe was responsible are also discussed, as is Mugabe’s attempts to rationalize his use of the Fifth Brigade against civilians. The final discussion revolves around the use of “tribalism” or ethnic conflict by Anglo-American diplomats to help justify their lack of protest to civilian killings by a government that was also receiving development aid funding and military training and aid during this period.

The Libyan case study in Chapter 3 reveals how harrowing the introduction of democratic elections can be in countries without national unity or any of the attributes of a modern state. Qaddafi’s ideology of a stateless, egalitarian society based on an idiosyncratic blend of Islamic and Marxist concepts left Libya’s transitional regime largely without a bureaucratic apparatus to implement policies. Qaddafi had also reinvigorated Libya’s tribal system by favoring his own and punishing the region and tribes that were the base of support for the prior monarchical regime. Competitive elections in Libya were implemented in a country without a national military that could monopolize the use of violence. In its place, during the civil war, a welter of regional, local, tribal, and ideological militias – some more powerful than the “national military” – emerged and prevented transitional governments from being able to provide peace and security for Libyans. There was also a military strongman in Libya, General Haftar, seeking to utilize the near anarchic conditions to forge a military authoritarian regime – by reining in the militias and providing desperately needed security.