This introduction poses the central thesis of this volume: that the early Islamic empire was tied together by networks of social dependency that can be tracked through the linguistic and material traces of interconnectivity in our sources. It is suggested that the particular relationships that emerge from the granular case studies in this volume can illuminate the constituent parts of the early Islamic empire as a whole. Studies link material and textual sources, and in particular focus on the language and rhetoric used by sources to describe relations and interactions, and what they show of the modes, expressions and conditions that governed communication and interaction. It is suggested that empires are not ruled by top–down force alone, but that legitimacy and stability are created in various ways, both top–down and bottom–up.

This chapter explores the relationship between natives and migrants in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945 using contemporaries’ memoirs. It shows that migration status and region of origin served as salient identity markers, structuring interpersonal relations and shaping collective action in the newly formed communities. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that indigenous villages and villages populated by a more homogeneous migrant population were more successful in organizing volunteer fire brigades than villages populated by migrants from different regions.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

Chapter 6 focusses on the different forms of cross-ideological alliances between Islamist and leftist movements that were made to oppose the authoritarian regime. Far from romanticising those experiences into the clichéd concept of good opponents all coming together to fight the authoritarian regime, the chapter demonstrates instead how building cross-ideological alliances provoked ruptures and crystallised dissension within the constellations of actors themselves. It also shows how specific organisations and actors, mobilised on several scenes, came to play different roles in those alliances. The chapter goes on to demonstrate how each constellation of actors also maintained its own spaces of sociability and its own networks. Long-distance activism entailed other forms of activities that were turned towards group members in order to maintain activist groups despite their members’ new political lives in exile. Both Islamists and leftists worked to preserve their communities and to ensure the continuity of activism, albeit in different ways.

Building relationships and utilizing support networks on and off campus as a first-generation college student (FGCS) from an immigrant family is critical to achieving postsecondary success. This chapter explores the personal support networks and help-seeking preferences of immigrant-origin FGCSs as part of a three-year longitudinal mixed-methods study with FGCSs at four public Hispanic-serving institutions in California. We employ social network analysis methods using survey and interview data to explore the types of relationships twelve Latinx immigrant-origin FGCSs have that provide them support in college. To guide our analysis, we use Yosso’s (2005) model of community cultural wealth. Findings reveal the significance and specific types of support provided by parents, siblings, extended family, friends and peers, co-workers, and college advisors. These findings promote an expansive view of familial support, with many connections providing encouragement, motivation, and tangible support and serving as brokers to college-based resources. Recognizing these relationships can facilitate the modification of student services and programming to help FGCSs enroll and persist in college.

Drawing on interviews with a range of individuals with migratory histories, this chapter investigates why families choose to bury their loved ones locally or to reptriate to countries of origin, analyzing the significance that they attribute to these choices. While local burial laws and the limited availability of Islamic cemeteries impact the feasibility of performing religiously appropriate funerary rites, this chapter argues that family ties, ideas about the meaning of national soils, and feelings of social inclusion or exclusion play a larger role in determining burial outcomes and their social significance.

We conclude by placing our arguments and findings into the current context of rising political opposition to international migration. One of our central claims – substantiated by a range of empirical evidence – is that migration economically benefits both migrant-sending and -receiving countries. Migrants foster new international capital flows to both their home and host economies, and the remittances they send shield family and friends from negative shocks and help them invest in new assets. Yet in the US and Western Europe, anti-immigration politicians and parties threaten these potential gains. If nativist movements continue to enjoy electoral success and begin restricting immigration, the benefits of global human mobility will be increasingly in jeopardy. Just like every other stage of the migration process, harnessing the opportunity that mobility presents is a politically contingent proposition.

What makes some challengers willing and able to embrace a strategy of civil resistance and others not? This chapter shows how social ties–direct interpersonal connections that link members of a challenger organization to other actors in the society–are central to each of these processes. Two types of relationships, what I term “grassroots ties” and “regime ties,” are especially important. Each has distinct implications for different dynamics of challenger-state contention. I develop a typology of challenger networks based on different combinations of these ties, and make predictions about each type of challenger’s likelihood of initiating a campaign to overthrow the regime using a strategy of civil resistance. An attention to challengers’ social ties holds the potential to explain cases that other theories struggle with, such as variation within regional “waves,” within states, or even within movements over time. It can also improve our understanding of how other theoretical mechanisms work by suggesting why some movements might be more vulnerable to repression or fragmentation than others, or how tactical repertoires can evolve.

The early months of 2011 saw a wave of upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa that became known as the Arab Spring. But despite the spread of resistance campaigns against aging dictators across the Arab-speaking world, not all campaigns employed the same strategy. This chapter reveals how the social ties that underpin challenger groups can explain variation we see across cases in the Middle East as well as the tragic trajectory from civil resistance to repression to civil war within Syria. I begin with a brief discussion of Egypt and Libya, both to provide background context as well as to illustrate their consistency with the theory. I then turn to the case of Syria’s uprising to show how practices of selective social exclusion from the state resulted in a challenger coalition that had substantial grassroots ties to various social groups throughout the country, but limited ties to the regime. This produced a campaign that was initially able to attempt civil resistance, but eventually fractured into violence in the face of extreme state repression.

Civil resistance has proven itself to be a powerful force in international politics over recent decades. What this book has shown, however, is that the story of how civil resistance works begins long before protesters take to the streets demanding regime change. Challengers have been working for years to build organizations, form coalitions, and experiment with various tactics of resistance. The state has been playing this game as well, trying to pre-empt, co-opt, repress, and shatter organized challenges to its rule. The result is that not all challengers are equally positioned to attempt civil resistance. While traditional theories of contentious politics put great emphasis on the ability of states to shape and constrain the political opportunities available to challengers, the central argument of this book has been that the specific attributes of challengers matter as well. Challengers with social ties that link their core members to multiple social groups as well as to key pillars of regime support will be well positioned to engage in civil resistance while those lacking such ties will not. This concluding chapter provides a final reflection on the argument and evidence as well as implications for research, policy, and activism.

This chapter traces the strategic evolution of the Nepali Congress from its deliberation and rejection of nonviolence through a vote of party leaders in Calcutta in 1950 to its gradual return to an exclusively nonviolent platform by 1990. It illustrates that the movement's lack of social ties with other groups within Nepal limited its ability to generate mass mobilization, causing leaders to sour on the prospects of being able to achieve victory through civil resistance. But over the course of the following four decades, the Nepali Congress party was able to substantially enlarge its social base in ways that made it far better positioned for civil resistance. Interestingly, a challenger with a very different ideology, the Marxist-Leninists, underwent a very similar transition. After a failed effort at inciting revolution through the beheading of “class enemies” in the early 1970s, the Marxist-Leninists, like the Nepali Congress, engaged in a program of organization- and coalition-building that paved the way for the adoption of civil resistance.

This chapter moves backward in time to the “mandate period,” when, in the aftermath of the first World War and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the territory of Syria was placed under French colonial rule. The chapter begins with the Syrian Revolt of 1925-27. Launched by the “Patriotic Club,” a group made up of tribal leaders from the Druze religious sect in the mountainous Jabal Hawran region of South-Western Syria, this revolt shares many similarities with the early stages of Nepal’s Maoist uprising in that it was initiated amongst a relatively isolated ethnic community with few ties connecting them to the broader national population. The chapter then turns to an often overlooked case of mass civil resistance: the Syrian General Strike of 1936. The strike was led by an opposition political group called the “National Bloc,” whose leaders, while almost entirely older Sunnis from prominent families, stood at the top of extensive clientelistic networks that they were able to leverage to generate mass participation. The strike compelled the French administration to negotiate a treaty with the opposition leadership that set the groundwork for eventual independence.

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, campaigns of civil resistance have proven capable of overthrowing regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change using primarily nonviolent tactics. Recent research has suggested that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to achieve their self-stated goals, to produce democratic outcomes, and to yield an enduring peace. But if nonviolent strategies are so effective, why do so many groups still choose to take up arms? This book aims to explain the crucial early-stage strategic choices made by challengers to state power seeking the political goal of regime-change. Drawing on multiple cases each from Nepal and Syria, as well as global cross-national data, it details the processes through which revolutionary organizations come to attempt or reject civil resistance as a means of capturing state power.The book illustrates how the social ties that link a challenger organization with broader society inform the challenger’s expectations about the viability of nonviolent tactics and consequently its strategic behavior.