The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States further propelled the global focus on terrorism. Despite international efforts, the threat of terrorism remains throughout the world. In this chapter, the challenges in defining and analyzing terrorism are established by articulating the characteristics, structures, and motivations of groups that terrorize others. These definitions of terrorism, and the features of relevant groups, are then placed within the wider context of intrastate conflict. Key questions addressed include: Why does terrorism more frequently occur in war-torn countries? And how does its occurrence lower prospects for sustainable peace? This analysis is then used to inform modern counterterrorism methods, and how their evolution is critical for future international and national security along with peace mediation studies.

In this chapter we locate the question of ‘radical pedagogy’ in the current moment: a time in which insurgent social movements (such as #rhodesmustfall, #metoo, and #blacklivesmatter) are raising pertinent questions of representation, accountability and justice in society as well as at universities. We reflect on our own pedagogical-scholarly practice, and ask whether it is possible to separate language activism from other kinds of social-justice/decolonial/anti-colonial activism. In answering this question we draw on the Black racial tradition(s), and we emphasize the importance of being attuned to one’s local context. In our case this means the settler-colonial realities of post-apartheid South Africa, and the Imperial university. Being an activist-scholar means that one has to be prepared to engage in ‘difficult conversations’, with other scholars, but also with students and the wider community. These are conversations that are grounded in a willingness to ‘unlearn’ and to engage in ‘dialogics’ (Paolo Freire, 1968). One area where these ‘difficult conversations’ have gained traction is around questions of citation and curriculum: How can we teach and use citation practices that are ethically responsible? Can we develop an ethics of citation, and create a curriculum that is ethically sound?

This chapter opens with a literary history of armed conflicts in the Global South, and the violent suppression of these conflicts in the name of national security in India, Nigeria, Burma and the Middle East. Situated between the world literature debate and the vernacular turn within Anglophone literary criticism, the chapter develops disruptive (ir)realism as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the multiple modalities of violence in literary texts from the Global South. The chapter traces these modalities to the violent trajectories of insurgent lifeworlds through disruptive plots, mobile narrators, botched syntax, and alternating and collapsing timelines. Such tropes of disruption, the chapter reveals, are inflected in both the aesthetic configuration of insurgent figures who lack a guiding narrative anchor, and the uneven distribution of violence among fictional communities that results in further sociopolitical cleavages. The implied move toward post-terrorism in this chapter gestures toward the social (re)distribution of violence through myriad figures: rogues, rebels, guerillas, bandits, revolutionaries, and, most importantly, insurgents.

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.

In the moments before the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, nationalists in what is now the Indian state of Nagaland declared their own region independent. The Naga claim is key to understanding postcolonial state-making in the decolonizing world because it represented the limits of what could be an independent state in an era of seeming nationalist possibility. A Nagaland articulated the boundaries of national self-determination by demonstrating the practical restrictions of an international system in which national self-determination remained an aspiration rather than a right. Postcolonial state-making foreclosed the prospect of international recognition for many nationalist claimants, yet sovereignties that can only be seen outside the lens of their ruling state government persisted, even as they held conflicting claims of statehood.

The message of the Cuban Revolution for a generation of young Latin American leftists was to put aside reformist politics and take up arms. North Korea vowed to support all those who heeded that call. Its intervention came at a time when many young radicals sought a personal transformation, one that would allow them to participate in the crucial historical juncture they believed themselves to be living through. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Latin American militants sought this transformation in secret training camps in North Korea, with the hope of returning to their home countries new subjects, with the physical and mental attributes necessary to make revolution. Between 1964 and 1970, North Korea provided military training to at least nine revolutionary groups in seven Latin American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico. This chapter provides an in-depth overview and assessment of North Korea’s efforts to support revolutionary struggle in Latin America.

Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly difficult for major powers to translate battlefield victories into favourable political outcomes. As a result, US military engagements in the Middle East, Russian engagements in its “near abroad” and in Syria, French engagements in sub-Saharan Africa, and the African Union’s war in Somalia have turned into protracted missions with little prospect of decisive victory. This chapter examines the phenomenon of “endless war,” asking why it has become so difficult to bring wars to an end and what can be done about it. It shows that the problem is global, rooted in the changing nature, purposes, and attitudes of war. As wars become less about resolving disputes between states and more about the internal composition of states, and as those contests become ever more internationalized, the capacity of actors to sustain war have increased while incentives to pursue peace have declined. The first part examines the “endless war” thesis that grounds the problem in US liberal hegemony. The second part offers a brief explanation of factors that extend a war’s duration and inhibit peace. The third discusses how these issues might be addressed.

Chapter 3 provides a concise history of Guatemala’s and Nicaragua’s highly divergent conflict dynamics, but also illustrates how similarly narrow and insulated counterinsurgent coalitions emerged. The chapter first describes the road to armed conflict in both countries. It then examines the variables central to the process of wartime institutional change: the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat and the creation of a narrow counterinsurgent elite coalition with heightened decision-making discretion. It chronicles two moments in the Guatemalan armed conflict (the late-1960s and mid-1970s) and one moment in Nicaragua’s Contra War (early to mid-1980s) in which state leaders perceived a marked increase in the threat posed by insurgent forces. Finally, it examines how this sense of state vulnerability reconfigured wartime structures of political power in both cases as state leaders sought to combat the mounting insurgent threat.

Chapter 7 is the third part of our analytic narrative. We describe the processes that collapsed social order in Eastern Donbas. New social actors emerged and new militias found themselves in control of the territory, organized voting exercises, and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the central government. Unrecognized republics (the DNR and LNR) emerged. As Ukrainian forces were regaining territories in August 2014, despite the Russian army shelling Ukrainian border troops and sending weapons, it was not obvious whether Russia would send troops to assist “their” insurgents. Prior to Russia’s military arrival, we describe how “tidal” political processes on the streets quickly hardened what were previously fluid identity choices. The street overwhelmed old institutions as it became obvious that coordination by elites was not emergent. The realization that no law enforcement body had the capability to actually make arrests emboldened some groups, and new local players dragged their communities into sustained sedition.

In Somalia the boom in labor remittances inflows fueled a different type of informal economy. More specifically, while the oil boom period reduced the Somali state’s ability to regulate the economy as in Egypt and Sudan, the consequences of this development differed. In Somalia informal financial networks facilitated a thriving commercial sector comprised of firms oriented around clan families. It was not religious or class affiliations, but rather ethnic mobilization and conflict that became the most salient. This difference was due to two factors: the dearth of formally organized institutions (i.e., official banks, and publicly registered enterprises); and the fact that President Siad Barre pitted one clan against another in his search for legitimacy and financed a patronage system excluding clans and constituencies that opposed his rule. Thus, with the expansion of the parallel economy, the politics of ethnicity and personalistic networks quickly eclipsed the power of the state.

Chapter 6 details how the collapse of the State in Somalia led to the emergence of severe inter-clan conflicts. These conflicts were rooted in wrenching political conflicts over the monopolization of labor remittances and local currencies and characterized by continued attempts to institute law and order through military and ideological means. In the wake of state collapse, remittances continue to represent the backbone of the Somali economy. These are transferred through informal banking systems and remain untaxed by local authorities. The informal economy’s efficiency in facilitating currency trade, and the extent to which ethnic and religious networks control access to the wages of expatriate Somali labor is determining the political fortunes of local elite’s and variable patterns of state building in different regions of the country. The Somali case calls into question the very principles and analysis of conventional state building and “sovereignty” of nation states in less developed societies.

This chapter integrates findings from micro-level patterns of marronnage with macro-level conditions and examines how the rates and nature of marronnage changed according to broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors. I consider the evolution of marronnage and slave rebellion from the early 18th century within the context of exploding sugar and coffee industries, the expansion of the slave trade and rapidly increasing African population, structural cleavages created by war and famine, as well as other environmental factors. I also give particular attention to the presence of the maréchaussée fugitive slave police and the ways in which they did or did not successfully repress the presence and threat of maroons in the colony.