This chapter develops a theory to explain why counterrevolutions emerge and succeed. This movement-centric theory emphasizes the strategies movement leaders embrace, which, more than anything else, define the capacities and interests of the old and new regimes during the post-revolutionary transition. All revolutionary governments enjoy an initial power advantage over the old regime. Whether a counterrevolution emerges depends on how much capacity these old regime forces have left and how much their interests are threatened by revolutionary rule. And whether their counterrevolutions succeed depends on how effectively revolutionaries can preserve their initial capacity through the tumultuous transition. Specifically, the chapter lays out a post-revolutionary “governance trilemma,” which requires new leaders to simultaneously manage the concerns of lingering old regime forces, elites in their coalition, and popular groups who supported the revolution. The chapter then explains how these dynamics differ following two ideal-typical forms of revolution: radical-violent movements and moderate-unarmed movements. Counterrevolutions are less likely to emerge following extreme versions of both movements – because the former lowers counterrevolutionary capacities and the latter lowers their interests in restoration. However, counterrevolutions are more likely to succeed against moderate-unarmed movements, because they establish governments that lack key tools for effectively navigating the governance trilemma.

This chapter draws on the original cross-national dataset of counterrevolutions to examine global patterns and historical trends in counterrevolutionary emergence and success. It begins with a series of statistical analyses that support core elements of the theory. Counterrevolutions are much less likely to topple radical-violent revolutions than moderate-unarmed ones – a finding that holds across two different measures of these types. Subsequent analyses shed light on the mechanisms behind this relationship: loyal armies and powerful foreign sponsors are key to defeating counterrevolution, whereas robust parties matter less. Next, the chapter shows that counterrevolutions are most likely to emerge following revolutions with medium levels of violence, which leave the old regime with both the capacity and interest to launch a challenge. Further, there is little support for four alternative explanations, particularly when it comes to counterrevolutionary success. Next, the chapter evaluates how key events during the post-revolutionary transition (like land reforms and elections) affect the likelihood of counterrevolution. It concludes with an exploration of the decline in counterrevolution since 1900 (followed by an uptick in the last decade), which it traces to a combination of the changing nature of revolution and shifts in the distribution of global power.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments, findings, and contributions of the book. Counterrevolution is a subject that has often been overlooked by scholars, even as counterrevolutions have been responsible for establishing some of history’s most brutal regimes, for cutting short experiments in democracy and radical change, and for perpetuating vicious cycles of conflict and instability. The chapter reveals some of the most important statistics from the book’s original dataset of counterrevolution worldwide. These statistics raise a number of puzzling questions, which motivate the theoretical argument about counterrevolutionary emergence and success. After previewing this argument, the chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, including to theories of revolution, democratization, and nonviolence; to ongoing debates about Egypt’s revolution and the failures of the 2011 Arab Spring; and to our understanding of the present-day resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide. It finishes by laying out the multi-method research strategy and providing an overview of the chapters to come.

Once women’s appearance in public space is accepted, the tensions concern how they appear. Self-representations of gender identity are performed in part through differences in hejab (required modest clothing) and bodily comportment, varying from women in chadors moving through the traditional local spaces of the bazaar to secular cosmopolitan women styling their own performance of transnational independence. But women asserting their presence in public face harassment and the threat of violence, especially when stepping into the street, using public transportation, and asserting their right to social and spatial mobility. Vigilantes (the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, the “Spider Killer”) and gangs (the “Black Vultures” and the “Wolves”) targeting women can defend their attacks as morally justifiable, while the government has initiated programs of “social security” that primarily have sought to control deviations from approved forms of hejab. Nonetheless, women insist on their right to the city and their freedom to be fully present as women in public, whether by negotiating their personal space in a taxi or challenging the arguments of their attackers face to face.

Chapter one is the introduction to the book. It outlines the main goals of the book, previous scholarship, and a new methodological framework for understanding violence in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It presents an overview of the sociological approaches to the people behind the Dead Sea Scrolls and scholarship on the meaning of violence.

Chapter 7 focuses on the War Scroll, the most sustained portrait of the imagined end-time war against the Sectarian enemies. Alongside its elements of fantasy, the War Scroll simultaneously contains many prescriptive details for the eschatological war that the Sectarians believed was imminent. This chapter characterizes the War Scroll using the language of social anthropologists as a violent imaginary and argues that it functions as a propagandistic tool to prepare the Sectarians for this war.

This chapter provides general concluding thoughts on the book and insights into larger contributions to the scholarly fields in which it interacts.

This chapter surveys three broad categories of sexual violence – a term I use to designate rape, threatened assault, and kidnapping – portrayed in travel writing produced in Eurasia between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. These three categories of violence are differentiated by their perpetrators: foreign strangers; men upon whom women depend to facilitate their travel, particularly at sea; and trusted travel companions. The first scenario promulgates the popular myth that ‘real rape’ entails violence from a stranger and occurs only when women venture outside the household’s safe confines. Authors often use this scenario in overtly racist or xenophobic ways. The second situation centres on predation by male workers who provide necessary transportation or hospitality to traveling women, while the third sheds light on the intimate treachery of male travel partners. All three categories of violation hinge on the issue of trust in different ways. But medieval travel texts do more than share cautionary tales about the dangers of women’s travel in a patriarchal world. They also feature affirming and emancipatory strategies of resisting rape deployed by women traveling far from home.

This chapter examines the national-scale origins and political linkages of land mafias and rural militias in Brazil. These linkages, especially to political power, explain how, over just a few decades, an RDPE of active and open land-grabbing mafias has spread from southern Brazil to the Amazon. These cases illustrate the dynamics by which federal-level changes can expand an RDPE system to the national scale and to other parts of the same jurisdiction, polity, and political system. The land-grabbing process is linked to illegalities and violence, which are mutually self-reinforcing through the logics operating in these systems. This chapter examines the rapid post-2019 transformation of pastures into monoculture soybean or corn plantations, especially in southeastern Acre and along the paved BR-163 highway. Part of the problem is the institutionalization of illegal land grabbing and its mafia-like tactics, whose continuation is ensured through legal loopholes and ambiguities. The situation worsened, especially during the reign of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023), as land mafia dynamics penetrated deeper into the sociopolitical fabric of Brazil.

This chapter illuminates the impact of the 1948 war on the Palestinian medical community and locates its role in assisting their communities during the Nakba. Within a few months, the British administration withdrew its funding from all governmental health services, most Palestinian Arab doctors were displaced, and casualties mounted. Observing the medical profession during the war, this chapter follows heroic stories of perseverance. Lacking any state structures or national independent institutions, however, these efforts were necessarily localized and short-lived, suffering from a severe lack of supplies. Largely dependent on private practice, the Arab medical profession in Palestine began unionizing only three years before the war and had limited resources of its own. The chapter reviews the resources mobilized to deal with these challenges and the community’s fate following the Nakba.

Chapter 32 covers the topic of antisocial personality disorder. Through a case vignette with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers go through the management of a patient with antisocial personality disorder from from first presentation to subsequent complications of the condition and its treatment. Topics covered include diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder, risk factors, co-morbidities, management and advice to allied health members managing the patient.

Chapter 3 demonstrates the centrality of fiscal infrastructures to the action of Marlowe’s plays. His Tamburlaine plays, The Jew of Malta, and A Massacre at Paris all hinge on the agencies created by – and the violence associated with –wealth organized into treasuries. The protagonists of these plays – Tamburlaine, Barabas, and the Duke of Guise – draw attention to their own and others’ treasuries, and their stories underscore both the security and the volatility associated with treasuries in action. In each play, treasuries drive the action by creating security for some through extreme violence to others. For Marlowe, treasuries are central to his depiction of geopolitical existence. Fiscal realities, in turn, represent a primary formal mechanism impacting how Marlowe’s characters – and audiences – experience the antagonistic spaces of geopolitical existence. Marlowe’s awareness of the challenges of implementing sovereignty are thus central to his ongoing project of creating theatrical states of emergency.

Chapter 55 covers the topic of forensic psychiatry. Through a short answer question format with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers are brought through the more common aspects of forensic psychiatry. Topics covered include the roles of a forensic psychiatrist, typical preamble given prior to the start of a forensic psychaitry consult, expert witness role, fitness to plead, asssessment for criminal responsbilty, the associatiation between mental disorders and crimes and medical malpractice.

The modern study of the Peloponnesian War has suffered from a double blind spot. On the one hand, the traditional study of political history based on events has shown little interest in the great development in the study of ancient Greek economic, social and cultural history. On the other hand, social, economic and cultural history has shown little interest in the study of events like the Peloponnesian War. In this chapter I want to discuss an alternative framework that can incorporate the full wealth provided by Thucydides and bridge the gap between economic, social and cultural history based on static analysis and political history based on dry narrative. The key for accomplishing this task is the concept of entanglement. The Peloponnesian War can be understood as a history of three different kinds of entanglements. The first entanglement is that between different levels: local communities, micro-regions, macro-regions and the Panhellenic world. The second entanglement concerns a series of processes put into motion by certain key factors: violence, honour, wealth and political discourse. The third entanglement concerns the variety of actors involved in the Peloponnesian War: state apparatuses, alliances, empires, potentates, factions, networks, exiles, mobile humans, the enslaved.

One distinctive feature of the Peloponnesian War is the intimacy of its violence. The war is characterised by the sacking of cities, civil war and the impoverished existence of vulnerable communities living their lives as refugees in exile. In every other recorded conflict, this is a recipe that leads to high rates of sexual violence against women and children. Yet our historical sources are almost entirely silent about the occurrence of such abuse. This chapter explores the implications of the premise that there was a significant rate of unrecorded sexual violence during the Peloponnesian War. It details all the various circumstances in which such abuse was likely to occur and draws upon comparative material from other conflicts to show the strong likelihood of sexual violence. It also explores ways in which the topic of sexual abuse was addressed indirectly in art and drama through the metaphor of the sacking of Troy and the sexual violation of women in myth. The messages of these cultural products gain greater resonance and vitality when placed against a backdrop in which sexual violation is a regular occurrence as part of the nature of war.