The chapter examines how diverse forms of rural insurgency (i.e. banditry, caudillismo, millenarianism, revolutionary uprisings) were depicted in literature from the tapering off of the civil wars to the Mexican Revolution. Rural insurgency was a paramount preoccupation for letrados of the period, not only because of the material challenges that it posed to the imposition of agrarian capitalism and the sovereignty of the nation-state, but also because rural insurgency tapped into the cultural capital of rural societies (e.g. kinship, networks of patronage), forms of leadership (e.g. caudillismo), heterodox versions of Catholicism to articulate dreams of social justice (e.g. millenarianism). Hence, rural insurgency was considered, by its mere existence, an existential challenge to the very notion of a modern capitalist nation-state. However, the chapter examines how, at the same time that literature served as a sort of “prose of counterinsurgency” (Ranajit Guha), it was also a site of reflection on the dilemmas attending the constitution of a modern polity and culture.

This chapter concentrates on the last resort of the peasantry in the face of the high cost of living and exploitation and coercion by local state agents and dominants. Although direct confrontation was generally avoided, the peasants, when faced with no other alternative, did not hesitate to violate their oppressors. Although historians considered the Anatolian countryside calm and passive due to the rarity of open and massive peasant movements, rural unrest manifested itself through fighting for scarce resources, theft of crops and livestock, attacks on oppressive individuals and the wave of banditry that swept all of Anatolia during the period. This chapter argues that in contrast to the literature, rural crimes and banditry as the most explicit form of rural crimes were predominantly a component of peasants' struggle for survival and their resistance to social injustice rather than a tool of Kurdish nationalist groups or tribal reactions.

This chapter presents the book’s second case study: Chinese efforts to manage ‘non-traditional’ security issues in the Greater Mekong Subregion. It focuses on the challenges of illegal narcotics and associated criminal activity, particularly banditry on the Mekong river, to which China has become more exposed through its ‘reform and opening up’. Contrary to widespread assumptions that ‘Westphalian’ China is leery of undermining sovereignty, we show that Chinese agencies have actually moved to tackle these problems at source by sponsoring opium-substitution programmes and transboundary law-enforcement projects in Laos and Myanmar. The outcomes of these interventions depend on how Chinese party-state transformation dynamics interact with socio-political conflicts in these target states. On the Chinese side, opium-substitution has been hijacked by local cadre-capitalists in Yunnan province, skewing implementation towards their sectional interests. This has intersected with predatory social relations in Myanmar and Laos to undermine drug-suppression efforts. Conversely, Chinese central government agencies have had greater success in corralling neighbouring counterparts into a transnational policing network, recently cemented into a new international organisation, the Lancang-Mekong Law Enforcement and Security Centre.

This chapter reexamines the extensively discussed evidence for the circumstances that drove the Jews to a seemingly irrational and hopeless challenge to the power of Rome. The account of Josephus, on which we almost exclusively rely, offers the teleological scenario of a long build-up of hostility that issued inevitably in disaster. While acknowledging the background and circumstances that lay behind the conflict, this chapter emphasizes the numerous contingencies, unanticipated events, personalities, and miscalculations that played a key role in bringing it about. The tension and anxiety that had built up for two generations in a series of individual episodes supplied a significant impetus. But error, accident, and unintended consequences are critical to understanding the course of events. Josephus’ sense of inevitability, born of hindsight and his special situation, needs a corrective.

The judicial landscape in thirteenth century Japan was highly complex with multiple stakeholders in local conflicts. Court nobles, temples, governors, and warrior families all had vested interests in provincial affairs, yet official institutions for conflict management were often lacking or imperfect. The reach of the political centers was limited, and local officers in charge of law enforcement were rarely reliable in mitigating or de-escalating local conflicts. Local communities therefore had to develop their own conflict strategies on a continuum from evasive strategies to violent confrontations with estate owners, warriors, and neighboring communities. With the threat of a Mongol invasion in the second half of the thirteenth century, central powers sought to increase their control over the periphery. This process led to increasing resistance from locals who saw their traditional or recently acquired privileges and autonomy coming under pressure, and many of them resisted through violent means. This chapter argues that local communities developed armed organizations to manage inter-community disputes and as protection against violent, exterior threats, while such organizations were often described by central elites as banditry and predatory violence.

In contrast to the British, the French advances in Indochina were initially not concerned with the suppression of piracy, even though piratical activity was prevalent in Vietnamese waters from the mid-nineteenth century. The Vietnamese authorities, meanwhile, lacked the naval capacity, both to keep its rivers and coastal regions free from pirates and to fend of the French incursions. Piracy in the Gulf of Tonkin increased from the 1860s, as Chinese pirates congregated to Vietnam after the efforts to suppress piracy in the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca were stepped up. The main activity of the pirates was the abduction of Vietnamese, particularly women and children, who were trafficked to China, but also men who were trafficked as involuntary coolies. In the 1870s, the French Navy dispatched several antipiracy expeditions to the Gulf of Tonkin, and succeeded largely to suppress the piracy. The label piracy, however, continued to be used to denote any group of bandits or opponents of French colonial expansion in Vietnam. Doing so served to justify the colonisation of Indochina while resonating with a cultural demand for exotic adventure and horror stories in France.

Violence was part of everyday life beyond the wars and rebellions for many Yucatecans, particularly in the countryside. This background provides clues to what was considered normal or expected behavior and should make it easier to understand why, for example, acting violently was not a remote form of settling affairs and why fleeing to the bush or joining the Caste War rebels were attractive options to many lower-class Yucatecans. Life was grim for the lower classes in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Their situation varied considerably depending on whether they lived in urban or rural environments, whether they were self-employed or not and whether they lacked or had access to some means of production. Physical force intensified the severity of these living conditions, in particular for the lower classes and dependents, i.e., wives, children, and domestics, all of whom were subject to patriarchal authority. As in most parts of the world at that time, violence was a day-to-day affair in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Lower-class males suffered physical aggression at the hands of superiors and were beaten regularly by hacienda overseers and parish priests.

Violence was part of everyday life beyond the wars and rebellions for many Yucatecans, particularly in the countryside. This background provides clues to what was considered normal or expected behavior and should make it easier to understand why, for example, acting violently was not a remote form of settling affairs and why fleeing to the bush or joining the Caste War rebels were attractive options to many lower-class Yucatecans. Life was grim for the lower classes in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Their situation varied considerably depending on whether they lived in urban or rural environments, whether they were self-employed or not and whether they lacked or had access to some means of production. Physical force intensified the severity of these living conditions, in particular for the lower classes and dependents, i.e., wives, children, and domestics, all of whom were subject to patriarchal authority. As in most parts of the world at that time, violence was a day-to-day affair in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Lower-class males suffered physical aggression at the hands of superiors and were beaten regularly by hacienda overseers and parish priests.