Debates about Latinx literary representations of war tend to emphasize either how Latinx literature offers a means of repair for war’s ravages or, alternatively, that violence is constitutive of latinidad itself. This chapter charts a middle course through both positions by arguing that US Latinx literature highlights both irresolute, unreconciled wars and, what Jesse Alemán describes as Latinx “micro-wars” within major conflicts; such micro-wars, furthermore, often involve clashes and negotiations around the racialized boundaries of Latinx communities. Here we survey a range of Latinx representations of the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and wars of revolution and counterinsurgency in Viet Nam and Central America. Rather than waging war on an irredeemable enemy, we conclude, Latinxs lay siege to the imperial relationship championed by the US in most of these conflicts.

This concluding chapter first brings the reader up to date in Complexo da Maré and Rio de Janeiro. Since concluding fieldwork in 2015, much has changed in Brazil. Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 and Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2018. More importantly for Rio de Janeiro, Wilson Witzel, an extreme right wing candidate, was elected governor in 2018 and took control of the state’s public security apparatus. The dynamics of policing and violence have changed accordingly. Rio’s public security apparatus confronted and violently engaged Rio’s gangs with an intensity never before seen. Police shot into densely populated favelas from helicopters, showing little restraint even when innocent bystanders were present. In 2019 alone, Rio police killed an estimated 1,600 citizens. This chapter reflects on these developments and contemplates possibilities for the future. Finally, it addresses the generalizability of the book’s findings for other cities in Brazil and beyond while suggesting several avenues for future research.

The concluding chapter argues that the consolidation of the Company state in India led to a radical reconfiguration of the politics of Muslim pilgrimage. From 1818, a “paramount” Company Raj sought to secure its newly acquired sovereign supremacy by designating as legally deviant or permissible a host of circulating figures in and around India, including hajj pilgrims. Yet, against this backdrop, the British also became increasingly anxious of the supposedly subversive forces that were being smuggled into the Indian Subcontinent from Arabia by so-called Wahhabis, a colonial byword for militant jihadis. But then, in its efforts to tackle the violent insurgencies of “Muhammadan fanatics” as a specifically political problem, and so distinct from the putatively “religious” practices of pilgrim “faqirs,” the Company state and its secular legal regimes also became entangled in administrative quandaries of their own making. The result was not only pervasive forms of colonial “Mussulmanophobia” and repeated recourses to state violence against suspected Wahhabis under the cover of states of emergency. With the bigger and bloodier crisis of 1857, it was also a set of official gestures that radically recast and reified “religion” as the natural wellspring of modern Muslim politics in South Asia.

This chapter critically considers the historic and contemporary entanglements of the nonprofit sector with the state and the market, and the implications of such entanglements on nonprofits, marginalized communities, and the possibility of social change. Interrogating what happens to the structural institutional form of the nonprofit when intertwined with the state and the economy in what some call the nonprofit industrial complex, Rojas assesses the fallout that leads to exacerbated policing and incarceration of women and communities of color, among other deleterious impacts. The work of naming these concerns and critiques is necessary for nonprofits to potentially become avenues for social transformation. The chapter concludes with practical interventions toward building organizations capable of creating more just futures.

Chapter 3 reveals how violent individuals and a violent state are structured in the Constitution. Here, violent, White self-determination (the right of White individuals to overthrow government) and liberalism (the systemic differences central to a liberal state) mix with republicanism (a decentralization of authority that privileges violent acts of citizens, a group most often defined as propertied, White men). In Article IV, Section 4, the Second Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment, this chapter reveals the key formulations and tensions of American violence.

Chapter 9 traces worker repression in and around the 1877 worker protests. The crucible of low-road capitalism delivered the Great Strikes of 1877, but the layers of enforcement - from citizens and local police to militia and national troops - reveal the exclusive nature of the new industrial order. Since the Panic of 1873, railroad corporations had maintained profitability by lowering the wages of their workers. By 1877, workers’ wages moved from unequal to unsustainable as many now earned half their 1872 pay. While social and political leaders spoke sympathetically of laborers and their low earnings at the start of the Great Strikes, soon, in response to violent acts of working-class resistance (usually against corporate property), such rhetoric disappeared. Instead, these leaders framed workers as vagabonds and criminals - persons in need of surveillance and control. The workers’ violence was used as a reason to attack workingmen’s bodies and labor mutualism. When mixed with the hostile differences of liberal society, differences intended to keep wages low and the working class divided, the laborers on the bottom endured the greatest physical and economic harm.

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.”

Resisting Racial Capitalism begins with the premise that we need to look beyond the hegemony of the state and its grammars of justice. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson, it argues that the state is not a neutral arbiter of justice that can or should be appealed to for rights, recognition, or restitution. Rather, the state is a relation of violence which is central to racial capitalism. This is a type of violence which cannot be reformed away through a politics that merely strives to make oppressive institutions more diverse, inclusive, or tolerant. As a permanent war waged on those deemed delinquent, wayward, and undeserving, the state must itself be abolished.

After at least two decades of the proliferation of narconarratives mediated by the official discourse of “drug cartels,” an emerging current of writers, filmmakers, and journalists have renewed a critical approach to state violence and its implications beyond typical assumptions about organized crime. From the thousands of killings of the so-called war on drugs to the forced disappearance of forty-three students in the state of Guerrero in 2014, this counterhegemonic critique aims to rethink – and, more importantly, to reimagine – the most pressing events of violence as the result of social strategies of control and exploitation promoted by state structures and geopolitics. This essay proposes to analyze the politicized imagination intersecting state violence and drug trafficking that deliberately leaves behind the habitual hegemonic narconarratives to articulate instead a critical understanding of the criminal networks as by-products of official power. Along with the analysis of key works of fiction, film, and journalistic investigations, I will engage debates on state violence and neoliberalism in the age of permanent national security crises.

This chapter sets out the book’s main theoretical claims. It argues that understanding the emergence of revolutionary challenge along ethnic lines requires a focus on local-level interactions between social actors and state agents and how they vary over time. This approach directs attention to variation within ethnic groups and, specifically, to linkages between sub-ethnic units and the state. The chapter then presents the book’s main theoretical intervention: state linkages often condition the participation of “ethnically excluded” populations, and incumbent response to challenge is often not focused singly on dividing the population on ethnic lines but includes important forms of conciliation aimed at preserving cross-ethnic clients. This conciliation often fails, however, because informal, ethnically dominated autocratic regimes resort to violence to deal with immediate threats posed by prolonged urban demonstrations and challenger violence, shattering many of the linkages forged across ethnic lines. This view of challenger–incumbent interaction under ethnically dominated rule challenges the dominant view that regimes intentionally polarize their polities on ethnic lines to cling to power; the patchwork of bargains such regimes strike with various elements of the populations they rule can channel contention toward ethnic violence, even when ethnicization is not in the incumbent’s interest.

This chapter sets the political and social context for the events of the 2011 Syrian uprising. It describes the topography of ethnic boundaries and, using original quantitative data, shows that ʿAlawis were disproportionate beneficiaries of state largesse, accessed through informal ties and formal positions in the civil service and military. Nonetheless, substantial segments of the Sunni Arab population were also tied to the state through personalistic ties and public institutions. Then it describes the relationship between ethnicity and state access in historical and theoretical terms, arguing that the Baʿth regime instrumentalized existing social structures in some cases, building ties to local leaders with customary status, and worked to break down these ties in other cases, building new ties with individual citizens through corporatist development and state employment. Finally, the chapter examines the effects of neoliberal policies, enacted after 2000, on these linkages. It argues that these policies exacerbated the suffering of many Syrians already lacking state access but left the cross-ethnic structure of state–society ties intact.

This chapter narrates the events of the first year of the Syrian uprising, drawing on an original newspaper event catalog, activist-generated databases of non-state actor fatalities, and numerous town-specific reports composed by Syrian and other Arab research organizations. In doing so, it describes the outcome to be explained in subsequent chapters: variation in forms of challenge to the Syrian regime over time and space. The picture of contention in Syria presented in this chapter suggests that there was no lockstep progression from nonviolent, urban civic protests to ethnic insurgency in the countryside during the first year of the Syrian uprising. Rather, violence erupted almost immediately following the onset of challenge at some sites, while remaining absent at others throughout the entire first year of the uprising. Claims advanced by challengers varied similarly; they remained focused on civic demands throughout the first year in some areas, while quickly jumping from local to ethnic grievances in others.

This chapter examines the impact of the fusion between religious claims and nationalism on state policies – domestically, regionally, and internationally. It offers a comparative perspective on the extent to which religious claims bestow sacredness on the state’s workings of power – or what we define as sacralized politics. The chapter analyzes how, through hegemonic nationalism, states invoke religious claims to legitimize political and national strategic goals in domestic and international politics. To trace the matrix of power that sacralization of politics mobilizes, and when looking comparatively at various case studies, the chapter points to three main (among other) modes of sacralization’s profound impact on politics. The first operates through managing consciousness, including the construction of self-identity in relation to others; the second, through territoriality and the politics of land claims; and the third via political governance, using violence and a necropolitical regime of control. While each mode can operate separately, all operate through mutual reinforcement and each with elements of sacredness, resulting in an emergent power structure that is self-sustaining, religiously infused, and resistant to change.