British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”

Contrary to the long-standing historical view that describes Brazilian independence (1822) as a peaceful pact among elites dominated by Emperor Pedro I, this chapter examines popular participation in this conflictual process. Recent scholarship has shown how elite divisions opened space for popular political actors, as did conflicts and military mobilizations in several provinces. The public sphere expanded by Portuguese constitutionalism encompassed broad sectors of society. Slaves understood the Portuguese constitution as a liberating document and used military mobilizations to pursue their interests. Indians under Luso-Brazilian rule demanded rights used the new language of citizenship to demand relief from labor and militia service while semi-autonomous groups aligned themselves with the contending parties to defend their claims to land. Widespread worries about the “classes of color” indicate the diverse ways in which free people of color’s demands rights and inclusion in the new polity threatened the status quo. While these popular challenges were largely defeated by 1825, they profoundly shaped the independence process and left a long legacy.

Chapter 7 examines the extent to which federal, state, and local governments can restrict public protest during public health and civil unrest emergencies. The chapter describes how the current system of emergency powers affects public protest rights, including through curfews, limits on movement, and bans on public gatherings. It rejects the notion that the First Amendment and other rights can be “suspended” during declared or undeclared emergencies and argues for strict judicial review of measures that ban or severely restrict public protest during emergencies. The chapter also addresses the role of the federal government, including U.S. armed forces personnel, in policing civil unrest and prosecuting protest-related offenses. It advocates a minimal federal presence and function at public protest events and urges federal cooperation with states and localities.

The clash between the First and Second amendments in the US Constitution – the First guaranteeing free speech and the Second guaranteeing the right to bear arms – leads into a discussion of legal interpretations of the Second Amendment from 1791, when the states ratified the Bill of Rights, to the present. Using a corpus linguistic analysis of the Second Amendment, with a focus on "the right to keep and bear arms," and an examination of the US Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), we see that, just like any other text, whether a literary work, a sacred book, or an everyday communication like a memo or shopping list, legal interpretation is always contingent, always subjective, and and always subject to reinterpretation.

The chapter charts what we know of Thistlewood’s early Lincolnshire years, his character and appearance, his gentlemanly status and modest wealth, his fecklessness and gambling, the birth of his illegitimate son Julian, and his marriages – particularly to Susan, who stayed with him to the end.It follows his increasing radicalisation after the family’s arrival in London in 1811 and his joining Evans’s Society of Spencean Philanthropists in 1814.

If the intricacies of global supply chains form one crucial aspect of roadblock politics, we also need to investigate another aspect of logistics in order to unpack Congo’s roadblock proliferation. Focusing on Central African hinterlands where roads are a fading memory, Chapter 8 asks how contemporary rebel groups adapt to a terrain that is inimical to military logistics as usual. Rebels themselves have best theorized what military logistics might look like in the debris of infrastructural empire. By providing a glimpse of the inner workings of a few of Central Africa’s many rebel groups, this chapter explores what one armed group itself dubbed ‘non-conventional logistics’. From the perspective of conventional, centralized states, this form of organization is suboptimal, but it is perfectly geared to withdrawal from and rebuttal of the reach of outside powers. Yet the purchase of this approach extends beyond rebels: given the overbearing logistical and geographical constraints, state agents by necessity also practise versions of guerilla foraging, blurring the lines between enemies. Taken together, the examples provided in this chapter prompt one to consider political control not as a fixed property of mutually exclusive territorial configurations, but rather as a mobile and temporary achievement in the political economy of circulation.

Chapter 6 relates the individual status of the “players” on an armed conflict battlefield. It is the second question students should answer (after the conflict’s status) because the players’ status determines their rights and legal duties in the conflict. Civilians and combatants predominate, of course, but there are numerous subcategories for both: prisoners of war, retainees, militia, persons accompanying the armed forces, levée en masse fighters, spies, and mercenaries. Each category is explained and placed in relation to the other players. What if a civilian captured with weapons claims noncombatant status? LOAC provides for an informal tribunal. How is the familiar “farmer-by-day-fighter-by-night” dealt with? Who is an “unprivileged belligerent” and are they the same as an “unlawful combatant”? What status for a civilian who directly participates in hostilities and what are their battlefield rights, if any? Who is a “protected person” and what makes them such? These statuses and more are considered, along with their positions vis-à-vis the combatants who engage in combat with them.

Tsar Boris Godunov had a designated heir but was overthrown by the First False Dmitrii, and his son perished in the Time of Troubles. The false Dmitrii claimed to be the son of Ivan the Terrible and the true heir. After the people of Moscow had overthrown and killed Dmitrii, the boyar elite elected as tsar Vasilii Shuiskii. After further disorder, the Polish king Zygmunt III imposed his son Władysław on the Russian throne by a forced election, but the militia under Prince D. M. Pozharskii and the merchant Kuzma Minin defeated the Polish forces. In 1613 an Assembly of the Land elected Michael Romanov as tsar. Tsar Michael did not marry until his father, Filaret, Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, returned to Russia in 1619. After Michael’s marriage to Evdokiia Streshneva in 1626, he fathered many children, including his heir Aleksei. Michael followed the older procedures, requiring oaths to the whole family and demonstrating his choice of heir by giving his oldest son a role in court ceremonies. At no point did the Russians suggest that election was in any way inferior to heredity in succession to the throne.

One of the defining features of the early modern political order in Japan was the monopoly of the means of violence held by the samurai class. In the decades preceding the Meiji Restoration, however, some Japanese officials at the regional and local level began to advocate for the mobilization of commoners into militia. They were motivated by the belief that the existing samurai-based military and security forces were not sufficient to meet the challenges they faced - first, from foreign powers, and then, increasingly, from domestic disorder. Japanese historians have long been interested in these farmer-soldiers, or nōhei, generally with the goal of assessing the revolutionary implications of farmers taking up arms and forming militia. This chapter will take a different approach to the study of nōhei by situating them within a larger trend in local governance in the late Edo period. Nōhei militia were one of many examples in which local elites, motivated by the desire to restore order to communities they perceived to be in crisis, took on new leadership functions and intervened in new areas of public life.