Black Rhodesian soldiers’ loyalties – as opposed to motivations for initial enlistment – were premised upon a shared sense of professionalism. Inherent to this ethos was their soldierly prowess, honed through continuous training and operational experience, which was also co-constitutive of a deep, emotive sense of mutual obligation between fellow soldiers. Furthermore, these soldiers were socialised into a distinctive military culture, which created a powerful, emotive regimental loyalty that incorporated traditions to create an accentuated sense of in-group belonging and homogeneity that bound them to their regiment, and thereafter the wider army. professionalism and regimental loyalties of these troops ensured that they remained steadfast during combat and in the face of the surge in popularity of the nationalist challenge to white settler-colonial rule.

This book has contributed to a new understanding of the loyalties of black Rhodesian soldiers during the era spanning the terminal years of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Zimbabwe’s war of liberation, and the tumultuous first two years of independence from 1980. That these black soldiers fought for white-minority rule in Rhodesia appears, superficially, both paradoxical and extraordinary, and it has led to their characterisation as supporters of the RF, mercenaries, or ‘sell-outs’ in neo-Rhodesian and nationalist literatures.

Chapter 1 begins with the story of the 2015 La Línea customs fraud scandal and its connections to the criminal structures mounted by military intelligence at the height of the 36-year civil war. Drawing on this illustrative example, the chapter reframes debates on post-conflict statebuilding and puts forward a novel argument about how counterinsurgent elites introduce institutional innovations that undermine core state activities. It further lays out the key theoretical contributions of the book, specifically as they relate to war and state formation and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. The chapter also introduces the Central American context and explains why it is a fruitful setting in which to explore the institutional legacies of civil war. It then discusses the book’s methodology and the unique archival and interview sources of data.

Argentina transitioned from military dictatorship to democracy in 1983 and elected Raul Alfonsin as President. Alfonsin attempted to lower Argentin's tariffs and pass other neoliberal policies, but his economic reforms were blocked by a series of thirteen general strikes launched by the CGT, the labor union confederation led by Saul Ubaldini. When Alfonsin left office in 1989, Argentina's average tariffs still stood at 25 percent, only three percentage points lower than they had been in 1982, the last year of the military regime. By 1991, however, Alfonsin's successor, President Carlos Menem, was able to low tariffs to just 12 percent. This chapter tells the story of how Menem used labor repression to overcome union opposition and quickly open Argentina's economy.

In the mid-1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi attempted to lower India's tariffs and open the country's economy to global competition. Gandhi's trade policy proposals led India's protectionist labor unions to launch a series of general strikes that helped to block these reforms; Gandhi left office in 1989 with India's average tariff still above 80 percent. This chapter continues this story into the 1990s, when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao launched a new attempt at trade liberalization. By 1996, Rao managed to lower India’s average tariffs to 37 percent - a major success compared to Gandhi's efforts, but relatively gradual liberalization compared to many other democratic developing countries. This chapter draws on archival research to illustrate how Rao used labor repression to weaken union opposition to his economic reforms.

Chapter 3 elucidates the link between national structures and foreign aid delivery. To that end, the chapter traces how national aid organizations vary in their bureaucratic structures and practices and how this variation maps onto my binary donor typology of neoliberal and traditional public sector donors. By tracing the link between particular institutional environments and aid delivery decisions, the chapter shows how bureaucratic structures and practices influence priorities of aid officials and authorize, enable, and justify particular delivery tactics and donor–recipient interactions, while precluding others. That is, I lay out why and how institutions of different ideological orientation constrain donor officials differently, and how they influence aid officials' decision-making.

Chapter 3 lays out the methods and the logic of case selection that underpin the book. This book is a theory-building and theory-probing undertaking—I build a theory of how the alternative benefits of bargaining lead combatants to seek out UN peacekeeper while probing how the credible commitment theory of war termination drives the desire for peace operations—and process tracing using a most-similar cases approach is one way to do this.In this chapter, I outline first the method by which I selected cases, building a catalogue of the UN’s peacekeeping successes and failures, and a timeline of what peacekeeping successes and failures combatants would have seen around the world as they were negotiating, in order to do so, and then discuss the evidence and tools I use to process-trace the Rwandan and Guatemalan peace processes. Readers who are interested primarily in the substance of the text and not in methodological discussion, or a discussion of multiple archives, can proceed to the subsequent three chapters without reading Chapter 3.

This chapter uses archival material connected to the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain to reconstruct three performances of ancient tragedy in the first decade of its existence, from 1963 to 1973. The productions of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (1963), Seneca’s Oedipus (1968), and Euripides’ Bacchae (1973) each highlight different elements of the British theatre company’s investment in performing ancient Greek and Roman tragedies in this period. Archival material allows the researcher to plot performative trajectories which combine the personal investments of world-renowned artists and theatre professionals like Ted Hughes, Peter Brook, and Wole Soyinka with the angry responses of audience members and the anxious fears of the theatre company. By bringing to light a body of ephemeral evidence including letters, memos, accounts of meetings, telegrams, theatrical programmes, production notes, and stage managers’ reports, the resulting performative reconstructions go beyond the text of the play and bear vivid witness to the powerful emotions and cathexes that ensure the continued popularity of ancient tragedy on the modern stage.

There are only a handful of repositories in the United States that hold archival resources relating to the author, Cormac McCarthy, and even fewer containing original correspondence. This chapter identifies key collections of letters available to researchers, and provides a guide for navigating these archives. With emphases on personal and professional correspondence, I provide an overview of McCarthy material in the Albert Erskine Papers at the University of Virginia; the Cormac McCarthy Papers at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University; and the Random House Archive at Columbia University, as well as a few smaller collections.