The chapter explores the workings of gender in genocidal processes. It frames the subject inclusively, to address women and men; masculinities and femininities; the specific vulnerabilities of LGBT people; survivor, victim and perpetrator experiences; and structural and institutional forms of sexualized violence alongside event-specific ones. The chapter encourages readers to rethink major categories of analysis and themes in genocide studies as gendered phenomena.

Although pervasive, gender is often overlooked for its role in how genocide is conceived, performed, and experienced. The chapter traces its influence in connection to other explanatory narratives and theories such as the roles of the state, militarism, war, imperialism, racism, and sexism. Was gender one of many facets or a primary force in escalating or de-escalating the violence over time and space? Variables of race and ethnicity, themselves typically intersecting with social class, crucially shape how gender identities are imposed, interpreted, and experienced. The interaction of gender with an age variable is also noted. The coverage spans case studies of genocide in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa in order to illuminate the universal and particular. The authors also present on the role of courts in prosecuting mass rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide. The conclusion points out key intellectual, ethical and policy challenges ahead.

Chapter 5 analyses the different forces working against the ‘abortive reformation’ discussed in Chapter 4. It begins with the Scottish commissioners, seeing their significance less in propelling a Presbyterian agenda than in their more circumspect undermining of the calls for reduced episcopacy. The chapter then discusses the various parliamentary forces working against episcopacy, along with the role played by more radicalizing religious discourses beyond Parliament’s immediate control. To explain why more marginal ideas were able to gain traction in public discourse about religious change, attention turns to the prestige of anti-Laudian martyrs and the disproportionate public importance of prominent Congregationalists, the format and distribution of the tracts themselves, but also the ways in which the language of religious change was also developing in this period, which opened up areas of ambiguity in which radical solutions could flourish. Here discussion centres on the languages of reformation, anti-Laudianism, apocalypse, eschatology and covenant, with detailed attention to the role played by the 1641 Protestation in particular in polarizing religious opinion. Importance is also attached to the conservative backlash that this radicalization provoked, which undermined conformist support for further reform and empowered more conservative and even Laudian figures.

This chapter describes and explains the fitful emergence of majoritarian political tactics in late 1641 and 1642 and the crucial turn toward consistently majoritarian decision-making between December 1642 and April 1643. It demonstrates how the House of Commons was unable to maintain its consensual decision-making practices once its members found themselves struggling over how to approach the early stages of the Civil War and their first peace negotiations with Charles I. Under these conditions of structural dislocation, members’ use of majoritarian tactics proliferated. Members who employed these tactics at the time clearly considered them to be emergency measures that enabled them to engage in effective status interaction under extremely trying circumstances. Neither these tactics nor majoritarian decision-making itself had yet become institutionalized. The 1641 controversy over protestations to the printing of the Grand Remonstrance vividly exposed the strains under which the Commons was struggling to continue to function. But the winter of 1642–3 was the clear turning point: consensual decision-making suddenly collapsed amid the emergence of war and peace groupings in Parliament and an array of other remarkable developments in English political culture between 1641 and 1643.