This chapters traces the evolution of the Nova Holanda gang’s governance practices from the mid-1990s until the occupation of Maré by the Brazilian Military in April 2014 through the analysis of newspaper archives, oral histories with residents and gang members, and a dataset of anonymous gang denunciations. Following its integration into the Comando Vermelho faction, CVNH maintained a benevolent dictator regime, combining high levels of coercion with responsive benefits, until several years of warfare with their primary rival led to the use of extreme forms of coercion against residents as disorder prevailed. By 2004, the war between CVNH and Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP) had ended though enforcement continued to be active and frequent, leading to a social bandit regime, in which the gang offered significant benefits and engaged in low levels of coercion. Then, following the resurgence of TCP in 2009 until the arrival of the Brazilian military, CVNH can be considered a benevolent dictator gang once again. They ramped up their coercive behavior in response to TCP’s more aggressive posture while providing significant benefits to avoid frequent police enforcement efforts.

The third of Maré’s gangs, Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), controls an enormous territory, encompassing ten contiguous neighborhoods with an estimated population of 68,000 residents, more than twice that of Maré’s Comando Vermelho-connected gangs. Moreover, TCP’s turf has changed significantly over time as the gang has lost and won territory through violent battles with several rivals, which have had horrifying consequences for both gang members and residents. This chapter also shows how the nature of enforcement against gangs can shift radically as TCP developed highly collaborative relations with the police especially after 2009. The chapter traces these developments in TCP’s historic territories as well as the housing projects that they would control from the mid-1990s until 2002 and again after 2009. This chapter interweaves multiple types of data, including eighteen months participant observation, dozens of interviews with current and former gang members and residents, as well as journalistic accounts and denunciations to an anonymous hotline, to trace how TCP’s shifting security environment has shaped their governance practices over time.

In April 2014, two months before the start of the World Cup, 2,500 Brazilian Army and Marine soldiers occupied Complexo da Maré. They would stay there for the next fifteen months. The occupation of Maré was the culmination of Rio’s once-heralded Police Pacification Units, a public security program intended to recapture the state’s monopoly of violence from drug-trafficking gangs in hundreds of favelas throughout the city. This chapter begins by tracing the confluence of factors which led to the Brazilian military’s intervention. A mix of participant observations, interviews, and newspaper accounts then document the military’s arrival and their various operations and activities to combat gangs and gain the support of the local population. The chapter proceeds to analyze how and why each of Maré’s gangs responded differently to the challenges of occupation, arguing that the military lacked the capacity to fully expel or dismantle them though their presence shifted the dynamics of rival competition and threat, which produced the divergent gang responses observed.

In the context of the transnational rule-of-law crisis the world is experiencing, this chapter asks whether the institutional solutions typically embraced by contemporary Latin American constitutions make a difference in fighting contemporary patterns of rule-of-law violations, and what sort of difference they make. The chapter advances the preliminary hypothesis that Latin American last-wave constitutions make a positive difference. After recalling historic trends with regard to democracy and the rule of law in Latin America and providing an overview of the standard institutional tools contained in Latin American constitutions, it describes the patterns of rule-of-law undermining that dominate the current political scenario in Mexico. The chapter especially addresses attacks on the National Electoral Institute and the quest to weaken electoral reliability, and the militarization of public life and state functions. The analysis shows that the Mexican constitution is successfully used to resist these developments, but it also suggests that existing dynamics excessively rely on ex post reaction and the overcharge judiciary.

The environmental history of the Vietnam War is unique in the twentieth century for the unprecedented scale of aerial bombing and use of incendiaries such as napalm, as well as the United States military’s use of tactical herbicides to destroy forest cover in combat zones. Drawing on recent trends in environmental and military history, this chapter aims to provide a more comprehensive sketch of the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War. Besides the effects of bombing and herbicides, these include inquiries into the footprints of warfare in urban and industrial development, in ethnic and demographic shifts in former warzones, in the dispersion of invasive species, and even in the creation of wilderness or conservation areas.

The first chapter explores the new presence of the military in the city after the start of the war. It analyzes the militarization of civil society and the blend of increased prestige and tensions in civil–military relations characteristic of wartime. During the mobilization days, reactions in Prague resembled scenes in other European cities: streets buzzing with anxious agitation as crowds thronged army barracks and train stations. Increasingly ubiquitous gray uniforms delineated new visible wartime hierarchies. Contacts between soldiers and civilians sometimes led to violent clashes, especially prevalent around cafés and pubs. These locales were also hubs for spreading information in a context of increased censorship and military repression. General suspicion by the military authorities transformed Prague residents’ experience of the rule of law. The different facets of military mobilization and emergency measures in urban space are examined to contribute to the discussion on the nature of the Habsburg military wartime government.

The so-called ‘civil police’ which originated in London and then spread to the US and the rest of the world has been a crucial institution for maintaining the international order. This is because the civil police, unlike the army, is a coercive regime meant for ‘citizens’ rather than ‘foreigners’ or ‘subjects’. The civil police regulates ‘domestic’ space, while the military is oriented to ‘foreign’ or ‘international’ space. This essay examines the origins of this important institution in the United Kingdom and the United States and reveals its colonial genealogy. The first civil police, the London Metropolitan Police, founded in the nineteenth century, was modelled after a colonial counter-insurgency force, the Irish Constabulary. In the United States, the civil police was initially modelled after the London police but later, in the early twentieth century, appropriated a series of techniques and tactics from America’s colonial regime in the Philippines. The strategic operation of both civil police institutions has been to draw upon the colonial site while covering up its colonial counter-insurgency and militaristic origins.

This chapter analyzes the formation and expansion of social spaces for political debate and their impact on the formation of political identities as well as its entanglements with an increasing militarization of society. This chapter studies how the military quarters, the camps, and the campaign regiments transformed themselves into privileged spaces for public debate. During the process of Independence, the military forces engaged more in political debates, and members of these forces expressed their political opinions and affiliations in broadsides, manifestos, and printed proclaims. By bringing these often separated social and political spaces, we seek to analyze the impact and relevance that public opinion had in the processes of independence, paying particular attention to the formation of political identities, the emergence of a new political languages, as well as the diverse discursive strategies that leaders in different regions used to mobilize people militarily or to raise political awareness on soldiers. In this way, this chapter seeks to create original analytical connection between political knowledge and debate, and military mobilization in Latin America during the wars of independence.

Chapter 9 chronicles the postwar trajectory of extrajudicial killings within the Guatemalan police. It first examines state violence during the transition period and subsequent postwar police reforms, which included the creation of the new National Civilian Police (PNC) in 1997. The chapter then analyzes how the dominant wartime distributional coalition managed to survive peacebuilding reforms and uphold the undermining rules governing extrajudicial executions to eliminate “undesirables.” In an important contrast from the case of Guatemala’s customs administration, the PNC saw the direct reentry of these groups into the upper echelons of the security cabinet, highlighting a different pathway of institutional persistence.

Chapter 2 presents the book’s theory of wartime institutional change, which accounts for why civil war is a site of institutional transformation, conceptualizes different wartime institutional logics, and elaborates the causal process through which undermining rules evolve amid conflict. It argues that the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat within civil war unsettles prevailing institutional arrangements and empowers political and military elites who, as the architects of counterinsurgency, possess high levels of decision-making discretion. Under the pretext of combatting the “internal enemy,” this counterinsurgent elite introduces alternative rules of the game, which correspond to its narrow interests. The latter half of the chapter tackles why undermining rules persist within and beyond conflict. Where counterinsurgent leaders can knit together a broader set of interests with a stake in the wartime procedures and successfully co-opt new peacetime political and economic spaces, the undermining rules are more likely to survive. By contrast, shifting postwar elite alignments generate chronic instability, disrupting the institutional status quo.

Chapter 5 offers the first systemic examination of the strategic considerations that underpin an emerging trend that has not yet gained enough attention in either academic or policy circles – the growing role of counterterrorism in China’s foreign policy. China needs to enhance its force’s counterterrorism capabilities, protect the growing number of Chinese nationals and assets abroad, and build an image as a responsible international stakeholder. However, these goals conflict with China’s desire to minimize grievances arising from its economic activities, which could lead to the country becoming a target for international terrorist groups. Empirical analyses of original data on the counterterrorism joint military exercises held by China and foreign forces indicate that China is highly cautious and selective when it comes to these exercises. Military counterterrorism cooperation tends to closely follow Chinese economic investments.

The first power of the police is their ability to use force to protect and rescue third parties. This understanding departs in a critical way from the Weberian argument that the government has a monopoly on the use of force by observing that a police officer’s ability to use force to defend others is available to all people. It is not only provided for under laws that allow all people to defend others but also as a moral prerogative that exists prior to and outside of political arrangements, democratic or otherwise. The police are distinguished from their fellow citizens by embodying a role that discharges protection and rescue as a duty, rather than a prerogative. The discharge of this duty by what Nozick would call a “dominant protective association” is a necessary requirement to demarcate the state from nature, suggesting that the police role is integral to the definition of the state and a requirement of its initial formulation. From this duty follows the role responsibility to use this force as minimally and economically as possible, and as a backstop, the police role further sanctifies life by creating the citizen’s duty to retreat from interpersonal threats when they can safely do so.

Chapter 4 describes the debates that took place in the press immediately after the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which drew attention to the relationship between new concepts of the able body and the militarization of discourses of productivity. In the first Balkan War, the Ottoman armies were soundly defeated, and the empire lost its last landholdings in the Balkans. The perceived infirmities of the “Ottoman body” became a common thread in social critiques calling for all-out mobilization. This chapter traces the relationship between conceptualizations of the healthy, productive, and able body and discourses on the formation of an ideal citizen, as articulated by moralists, journalists, public figures, and memoirists of the Balkan Wars. I expose how calls for a productive body militarized a social issue during a time when Ottomans faced imminent threats of invasion. The militarization that characterized the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without first considering the process by which the body of the citizen became a site of national anxiety.

The Introduction frames the issue of war economies regulation from an international law perspective and defines the key concepts and frameworks used in the book. It describes the issues that arise at the nexus of economic activity and war, including the militarization of economic activity and the risk of predation, and identifies two kinds of economies as relevant: economic activity for the war and economic activity in the war zone. The chapter concludes by outlining the chapters in the rest of the book.