This chapter starts by delimiting the scope of the book and making clear that we focus on various types of domestic political violence but that international wars are touched upon as well. We clearly define these terms and provide examples that illustrate the differences between distinct forms of violence, before moving to a discussion of the costs that these forms of violence impose on society. Strikingly, some people believe that wars and conflicts are good business. They are not. This chapter shows that wars not only destroy millions of innocent lives, but they are also poison for the economy. In particular, wars may be lucrative for the few but disastrous for the many. The detriments of war are manifold and include human, economic and social costs. This is illustrated by a series of historical examples. Drawing on recent cost estimates, it is also shown that the costs of a given war spread well beyond the borders of the country at war, with continental if not worldwide consequences.

This chapter emphasises the key role that comic revues and music hall acts played in ensuring the British army had a continuous stream of recruits throughout the First World War. Through examining the songs, sketches and characters through which this was achieved, the chapter demonstrates the varied strategies used and the ways they drew on earlier modes of performance such as nineteenth-century melodrama. Particular emphasis is placed on the gendered ideology that was implicit in the performances examined, for example in looking at the dramatization of atrocity stories which were circulating in the press and the treatment of women in these plays and wider narratives. The chapter also focusses on music hall songs and performances by male impersonators such as Marie Lloyd. It encourages us to question the simple alignment of propaganda and popular entertainment and offers a more nuanced understanding of these performances through the lens of satire. By doing so, it demonstrates how satirising and parodying wartime experiences provided a release from anxiety. Stage satire and comedy, it concludes, offer a unique perspective on how modern total war saturated public life.

This book is the first major study of British soldiers’ violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using British soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain, to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, storm and sack of towns. The book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period, and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Storm and Sack reveals a multi-faceted story of not only rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.

This book is the first major study of British soldiers’ violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using British soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain, to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, storm and sack of towns. The book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period, and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Storm and Sack reveals a multi-faceted story of not only rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.

This chapter investigates British sack atrocities to civilians during the Napoleonic era. It analyses how British soldiers represented this violence in their memoirs, especially through the lens of sensationalist gothic horror; and the challenges of estimating the scale of atrocities. It adopts a multi-contextual and multi-causal framework for understanding these atrocities, from situational rage and the brutalising experiences of war to the cultural and political contexts in which sack violence could operate. Whilst most British soldiers participated in the plundering of stormed towns, the murder and rape of civilians during sacks was perpetrated by only a minority. Across soldiers’ writings, we find horror, shame, and moral outrage at such acts; empathy towards the suffering civilian; and a moral duty to bear witness. And despite lamenting the inevitability of such atrocities, this did not prevent individuals, especially officers, from intervening to protect civilians, especially women, acts framed by chivalric and humanitarian ideals.

The introduction highlights the attraction of the idea of human rights. It affords insight into the development of the new international standards, considers the philosophical foundations, presents matters of cross-cultural interpretation, and broaches the subject of controversies. The controversies reveal the underlying tension between cultural relativism and universalism. By turning to difficult challenges, it is possible to come to grips with shared values or cross-cultural universals. The powerful idea of human rights appeals because of the peremptory norms, known as ius cogens, e.g., the rights against slavery and genocide.

In the early years of the Second World War, news of atrocities was often met with disbelief or strategic scepticism (British Foreign Office) due, in part, to the success of inter-war claims that atrocity stories during the First World War were propaganda. The Polish Government in Exile developed an information strategy to overcome scepticism and reticence to respond. This chapter explores how the Polish Government in Exile sought to inform the world of the outrages committed by Germany and the Soviet Union during the invasion and occupation of Poland through official government publications. It focuses on eight core publications including those of the White Book and Black Book series (published between 1940 and 1942).

This chapter assesses the emergent mindset and the city’s insular nature by providing an analysis of the propaganda created in Königsberg during its siege. As the idea of Volksgemeinschaft steadily lost its appeal, propagandists struggled to convey their message to the fortress’s population. By drawing attention to the efforts of local propagandists, this chapter examines the impact of the Wehrmacht ‘on the ground’, and discusses the need to forge a Kampfgemeinschaft, based on Königsberg’s ‘battle’ rather than on Germany’s ‘struggle’. Rather than encouraging the population to leave the city, the fortress command instead propagated a false sense of safety. An assessment of the themes portrayed in local media reveals how, in a fractured Germany, local authorities presented their message and how they sought to link it to the larger regional picture of events. A martial narrative came to dominate Königsberg’s propaganda while the unfolding events were consistently explained by drawing parallels to the city’s Prussian past, offering an alternative to the National Socialist rhetoric. The population’s reluctance to leave the city until the very end is a sombre testament to the propagandists’ success in downplaying the dangers to which all were exposed.

World War II differed from preceding wars on account of the fact that the mass killing of civilians was a strategic objective of the war. Nowhere did Axis forces kill more enemy civilians than in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. This chapter gauges the nature of Nazi violence by illuminating the impact that German killings of Soviet civilians had on the Soviet war effort. Germany’s war against the Soviet Union rested on a transgression of the moral norms of humanism, which Nazi leaders purposely disavowed to justify the promotion of a particularist racial ethic and the mass annihilation of racial foes. Both the moral provocation that defined the Nazi project and its cruel effects for people who were defined as antithetical to the “Aryan race” registered profoundly with Soviet observers. They seized on the nature of German violence to build a moral case about their own war effort, expressed in the antithesis between “Soviet humanity” and “fascist barbarism.” This narrative, replete with detailed information about German atrocities, was paramount in mobilizing Soviet people to fight Nazi Germany. While Stalin disavowed universal ideals after the war, this did not diminish their wartime vitality and reach, or the Soviet Union’s decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The use of physical force was a common experience among the kruso’b in the second half of the nineteenth century. Up to the 1870s, they suffered repeated assaults by government forces. In turn, they exerted violence for practical and expressive purposes against Yucatecan soldiers and civilians, as well as against various pacífico groups, searching for loot, scaring Yucatecans away from their frontier settlements, demoralizing soldiers etc. The chapter discusses the changes in the armament of the rebels and their guerrilla tactics. Kruso’b assaulted settlements in Yucatán ranging from small, entirely Indian hamlets to haciendas, villages and larger towns. Obvious targets were army soldiers, National Guard members, those involved in the self-defense of settlements, and Indians in positions of authority. The kruso’b killed or captured Indians, vecinos, men and women, children and the elderly indiscriminately. Kruso’b behavior during and after raids on Yucatecan or pacífico settlements did not follow a uniform pattern. While members of a certain age, gender or administrative category were slain in some cases, they were spared in others. The taking and the treatment of captives depended on a number of factors, changing rebel needs for labor being one of the most important.

Although Caste War rebels were frequently despised as “barbarians” or “savages”, their culture, their society and their military organization were strongly reminiscent of rural Yucatán. Kruso’b and soldiers were both victims and perpetrators of internal and external violence. They employed force to attack the enemy, defend themselves, appropriate valuable commodities (food, booty) and take prisoners. Soldiers and rebels used similar tactics on their thrusts into enemy territory, mostly assaulting settlements with surprise attacks. Looting was a key incentive for both soldiers and kruso’b when it came to combat. Both rebels and government forces rarely distinguished clearly between combatants and non-combatants and both employed strategies of terror to induce inhabitants of frontier settlements to abandon their homes, thereby expanding the no man’s land between rebel territory and areas under government control. Internal violence occurred in both groups, although the underlying causes differed. Force served to maintain obedience of subalterns to superiors in army and militia units; violence was vital among the rebels to establishing and upholding the political hierarchy.

Organized groups of combatants such as warrior bands or armies are shaped by violence in at least two ways. One is their capacity to exert force against outsiders when, for instance, enemies are attacked or the squad is defended against external aggression. Violence is also frequently applied to group members to establish and maintain the internal hierarchy and uphold discipline. The chapter also discusses factors that foster the use of violence, such as the social or cultural distance between the conflicting parties, the dehumanization of the opponent or the reduction of personal responsibility by explicit orders or tacit encouragement. Civil wars differ from interpolity wars insofar as the contending parties are “subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities” (Kalyvas 2006:5). They frequently imply guerrilla tactics and counter-insurgency strategies that are particularly savage, with a disproportionate share of non-combatant victims. In addition, the violence here is “more intimate,” often among people with a high degree of closeness and peaceful interactions.

Offensive and defensive army action responded to multiple, partly contradictory logics. The supreme commander and his staff designed the official strategy to defeat the rebels, which officers at the lower levels were called upon to implement. The motives of officers and soldiers “on the spot,” such as personal gain, were frequently at odds with the official strategy, however, and shaped military activities and the use of force to suit their own needs. Finally, situational factors such as the immediate threats soldiers faced on duty, i.e., attacks, hunger and illness, impeded the pursuit of long-term goals. The need to procure food by harvesting enemy cornfields, or the quest for enrichment by looting or putting prisoners to work often triggered external violence. Both rebel and government forces were guilty of strategic massacres and other atrocities in a show of force or an attempt to demoralize the enemy or as acts of hatred and revenge. Looting was not simply an incidental feature of warfare. It became an integral part of the government system to compensate soldiers and volunteers for their efforts in the struggle against the rebels and to cover campaign expenses.

Organized groups of combatants such as warrior bands or armies are shaped by violence in at least two ways. One is their capacity to exert force against outsiders when, for instance, enemies are attacked or the squad is defended against external aggression. Violence is also frequently applied to group members to establish and maintain the internal hierarchy and uphold discipline. The chapter also discusses factors that foster the use of violence, such as the social or cultural distance between the conflicting parties, the dehumanization of the opponent or the reduction of personal responsibility by explicit orders or tacit encouragement. Civil wars differ from interpolity wars insofar as the contending parties are “subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities” (Kalyvas 2006:5). They frequently imply guerrilla tactics and counter-insurgency strategies that are particularly savage, with a disproportionate share of non-combatant victims. In addition, the violence here is “more intimate,” often among people with a high degree of closeness and peaceful interactions.

Although Caste War rebels were frequently despised as “barbarians” or “savages”, their culture, their society and their military organization were strongly reminiscent of rural Yucatán. Kruso’b and soldiers were both victims and perpetrators of internal and external violence. They employed force to attack the enemy, defend themselves, appropriate valuable commodities (food, booty) and take prisoners. Soldiers and rebels used similar tactics on their thrusts into enemy territory, mostly assaulting settlements with surprise attacks. Looting was a key incentive for both soldiers and kruso’b when it came to combat. Both rebels and government forces rarely distinguished clearly between combatants and non-combatants and both employed strategies of terror to induce inhabitants of frontier settlements to abandon their homes, thereby expanding the no man’s land between rebel territory and areas under government control. Internal violence occurred in both groups, although the underlying causes differed. Force served to maintain obedience of subalterns to superiors in army and militia units; violence was vital among the rebels to establishing and upholding the political hierarchy.