This chapter marks the starting point of our investigation of actual policy solutions to tackle armed conflict. When a doctor has reached her diagnosis, she must then decide on the right medication to administer. Similarly, while economists started by studying the drivers of political violence, in recent years increasing efforts have been made to understand how to cut the Gordian knot of conflict. As argued in this chapter, a first-order factor is the institutional environment, and in particular the need to give a voice to all citizens and groups in society. Democracy is desirable, but without proper safeguards it can have a dark side and result in blood being spilt. Furthermore, the type of democracy and the provisions of sharing power between groups matter. Closer inspection of local-level power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the building of modern Switzerland after its civil war in 1847, the difficulties for current democratization in Iraq and the franchise extension during the British Age of Reform drive this discussion forward.

The freedom and power of citizens was buttressed by the exclusionary effects on non-citizens. My reading of Apollodoros’ Against Neaira ([Dem.] 59) in Chapter 5 exemplifies the practical results of the ideology of freedom on all levels of Athenian society. The case calls into question the limits of citizenship and demonstrates how a status transgression can impair the jury’s own power. The prosecution speech alleges that Neaira, a resident foreigner, is guilty of pretending to be a citizen. As a foreign, female sex laborer, Neaira represents the antithesis of the model citizen. Neaira’s arrogation of citizenship privileges, however, gives her a measure of positive freedom and power. In contrast to other readings, I show that power struggles are crucial to analyzing the prosecution’s arguments. The prosecution attempts to show that instead of doing “whatever she wishes,” Neaira deserves to be subject to others doing “whatever they wish” to her. Apollodoros’ characterization of her transgressions as destabilizing citizenship indicates the centrality of autonomy and power to citizen identity. Hence, the importance of positive freedom was not simply theoretical, but practical.

The epilogue caps off the book’s argument by examining two formative Catholic religious devotions that structured narratives about identity, community, and citizenship in both Old and New Granada. The narratives provided by the Virgin of Chiquinquirá (New Kingdom) and the Lead Books and relics of Sacromonte (Granada) reconstituted these two “kingdoms” as Christian spaces whose inhabitants, despite whatever pre-miracle ethnic markers they might have carried, were re-branded as native Christians. Those devotion-driven Christian identities made them constituents of a wider, circum-Atlantic community, even as the inclusion of native meanings and symbols molded and transformed Christianity in order to adapt it to fit local exigencies.

Did safety nets for the neediest have to wait for government to build them with taxes? If so, why did it take so long for any government in the world to channel a significant share of national income to those with needs based on inability to produce? Why did tax-based social spending then appear only in the forms of poor relief and public elementary schooling, and primarily in Northwest Europe? This chapter locates and explains the delayed arrival of tax-based help for those in poverty. The following historical forces dominated both the timing and the Northwest European location of the emergence of government social spending: (1) Private safety-net mechanisms existed for millennia, but never came close to curing poverty, either today or in centuries past. (2) The rise of government revenue-raising capacity had to precede social-spending. This fiscal capacity arrived in Northwest Europe first. (3) Those in power were not motivated to provide safety nets until they feared disorder or until political voice had diffused far down the socioeconomic ranks. See Appendix A for detailed sources and notes.