bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Theory
Authors: Ong Lynette H.
Published: June 2022

This chapter theorizes two key concepts: outsourcing repression and everyday state power. Everyday state power constitutes participation, acquiescence, and legitimation, which undergirds societal acceptance of state directives without the use of force. The Chinese state engages nonviolent grassroots brokers to mobilize the masses for state pursuits. These brokers, who use their social capital to persuade and extract citizen compliance, also legitimate state repression at the same time. Outsourcing violence to thugs-for-hire allows for plausible deniability and the evasion of accountability even though it is also subject to agency problems. This book prompts scholars of state control to reconsider what constitutes repression when nonstate actors are engaged to do the state’s bidding; furthermore, it urges scholars to grapple with a new topography of state power when the Leviathan penetrates deeply into the society to mobilize the masses within. It also draws implications for the state’s role in economic development.
Outsourcing Violence
Authors: Ong Lynette H.
Published: June 2022

Chapter 3 conceptualizes a novel form of repression—“everyday repression” carried out by thugs-for-hire—as a state response to foot-dragging and banal noncompliance captured in what James Scott calls “everyday forms of resistance.” Quantitative evidence from an original and unique media-sourced event dataset supports the argument that everyday repression is a lower-cost repressive strategy, pointing to its negative or lesser effect on the likelihood of street protest and violent backlash, particularly in comparison with the police and government officials. Quantitative and qualitative data are used to create a typical profile of thugs-for-hire and the conditions under which they operate.
Case Studies
Authors: Ong Lynette H.
Published: June 2022

Drawing on detailed primary case studies, Chapter 4 turns to exceptional cases of outsourced violence that resulted in death or large-scale contention or that received official government sponsorship. Under those circumstances, thugs-for-hire were no longer a lower-cost repressive measure; instead, they became a liability to the hiring authority. The case studies also demonstrate the negative consequence on governance when the relationship between local governments and thugs transformed from principal‒agent to patron‒client, heightening the risk of government authority being usurped by criminal groups. In effect, they demonstrate rare practical consequences when the underlying conditions of outsourced violence are violated.
Networks of State Infrastructural Power
Authors: Ong Lynette H.
Published: June 2022

Chapter 5 turns to nonviolent brokers, who are part of the state’s networks of infrastructural power. Political brokers, such as members of urban residents’ committees and rural village committees, who derive their brokerage power from state appointment are perceived as grassroots state or quasistate agents. Social brokers, such as local elders, community enthusiasts, or long-time volunteers, derive their brokerage power from the social capital they possess in the community, drawn from years of relationships, or guanxi, cultivated with members with attendant emotional ties, or ganqing. Economic brokers are private individuals who seek profits by bringing state and society closer in negotiations and facilitate deal-making between them. Compared to political brokers, social brokers who exploit their social capital to mobilize the masses encounter significantly less resistance. Their standing in the community helps to legitimate the repressive acts, thereby lowering the cost of state repression.
Conclusion
Authors: Ong Lynette H.
Published: June 2022

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s arguments and explains how outsourcing repression applies to issue areas beyond urbanization in China. It also generalizes the arguments beyond China by summarizing the findings of comparative analyses on South Korea and India from Chapter 7, and comparing state-criminals relations in Russia during Yeltsin’s and Putin’s rule. It analyzes Xi Jinping’s Sweeping Black campaign that was aimed at rooting out grassroots corruption that involved the nexus between government officials and criminals. This chapter then contextualizes how the notion of outsourcing repression revises our thinking on state‒society relations in China and the country’s political future under President Xi Jinping. Finally, it discusses the ramifications of the tightening political environment for field research in China and the future of China studies as a whole.
The Puzzling Rally-round-the-Flag Phenomenon
Authors: Feinstein Yuval
Published: June 2022

The first chapter is an extended introduction. It presents the book’s focal empirical puzzle (i.e., why did only a few military actions and security crises in the United States generate rallies?) and then summarizes the book’s argument about the conditions under which rally periods have emerged in the United States and the processes that have generated these rallies. The next section sets the stage for understanding the emergence of rallies by defining and operationalizing the “rally-round-the-flag” effect, identifying the characteristics of people who rally around the flag, and discussing several background conditions that make rally outcomes either sizable and durable or weaker and short-lived. The following two sections explain the political significance of the rally phenomenon and discuss the broader contribution of the book to several fields of research. The final part outlines the book’s structure.
The Rally Phenomenon in Light of Competing Approaches to Public Opinion
Authors: Feinstein Yuval
Published: June 2022

This chapter examines the rally phenomenon in light of four prominent theoretical approaches to public opinion in the United States during wars. First, the rational public approach suggests a rally-round-the-flag effect may emerge in response to war if people think that the US military policy is likely to succeed and that the cost is low. Second, the elite consensus thesis proposes that rally periods emerge when the political elite feeds the public information biased in favor of the president and his foreign policy. A third approach, which the author titles the security-concerned public approach, suggests that events become rally points if they evoke a feeling of security threat in the public. Relatedly, a fourth, the manipulation of threat argument, highlights how the political elite propagate security threats to mobilize popular support for actions that they claim address those security threats.
On the Verge of a Rally
Authors: Feinstein Yuval
Published: June 2022

This chapter examines three events that led to increases in presidential public approval ratings, but not large enough increases to be considered a rally-round-the-flag result: the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, the 1986 air raid on Libya, and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The investigation shows that the potential for a rally existed in all three events, which occurred during a prolonged and frustrating struggle with anti-American terrorism. However, none of these events generated a rally behind the president because in each of them the presidential military policy did not include decisive action against a clearly defined enemy, which the public could view as putting the nation on track to regain its collective honor and prestige.
Moving Forward
Authors: Feinstein Yuval
Published: June 2022

This chapter begins with a summary of the book’s core argument about the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon. The chapter then proposes six promising directions for future research on the rally-round-the-flag effect: identifying the factors that cause some rallies to be stronger than others, investigating rallies in other countries, conducting cross-national comparative research on rallies, exploring how national culture affects the necessary conditions for the emergence of rallies, analyzing rallies outside the context of international conflicts and wars, and examining the long-term consequences of rally periods.
Tyranny and Honor
Authors: Al-Kawakibi Abdul Rahman
Published: June 2022

Tyrants encourage ostentation, which is when a person becomes a small tyrant in the shadow of the greater one. The tyrant creates and decorates false honorable individual agents to deceive the nation in the name of serving religion, love of the country, and expanding the kingdom.
Tyranny and Ethics
Authors: Al-Kawakibi Abdul Rahman
Published: June 2022

Tyranny corrupts good ethics and drives suppressed people to basic interests of feeding, drinking and reproduction. It makes it difficult to distinguish between what is good or evil in all issues. Tyranny encourages corruption, deception, fear, hypocrisy, and insincerity.
Tyranny and Pedagogy
Authors: Al-Kawakibi Abdul Rahman
Published: June 2022

When a person is born, their mind is usually pure and malleable. Teaching, training, and education drifts him towards good or bad deeds. Under the chaos of tyranny and oppressive administration, people can develop without proper education like wild plants. Subjects living under tyranny tend to live without clear objective or purpose. Distorted education, deception, and lack of free thinking clears responsibility away from tyrants, and blames it on fate and destiny, even blaming the people themselves.
Getting Rid of Tyranny
Authors: Al-Kawakibi Abdul Rahman
Published: June 2022

To get rid of tyranny, the author outlines twenty-five topics for discussion, establishes three important rules, and emphasizes the importance of non-violent struggle.
Preface
Authors: Al-Kawakibi Abdul Rahman
Published: June 2022

The author defines tyranny as a "disease" that plagues a society, and the devastating effects of oppression upon many aspects of social, political, and economical life.
The Transnationalization of Legal Education on the Periphery
Authors: Burgis-Kasthala Michelle
Published: June 2022

This chapter explores how colonial legal relations continued to shape legal education and institutions in Africa after independence. It outlines the nature of legal education within the context of postindependence policies that span from the periods of optimism to the radical degeneration in the higher education sector until the mid-1990s. It also highlights how Africa lags at the bottom of certain higher education globalization indicators, possessing extreme degrees of internationalization through the mobility of its students or dependence on foreign funding and epistemic resources. The chapter argues that the idea of Africa provides a critical lens in rethinking the role of legal education in the twenty-first century in a context of widening material and epistemic inequality. It considers the role of international donors with their renewed support for higher education from the 1990s.
Legal Education in South Africa
Authors: Madlalate Ralph
Published: June 2022

This chapter traces the development of South African legal education and situates it in the context of globalizations in the past and present. It argues that, in the field of legal education, the precursors to contemporary globalization established in the colonial era have foreshadowed current trends in transnational interconnectivity. It provides a vignette of the larger narrative of racial oppression in South Africa from the vantage point of legal education, capturing the indignity of life for the “colonized” and accounting for the African law that operated prior to the colonial encounter. It also demonstrates the embeddedness of racial oppression that is rooted in the colonial project within the South African legal system. The chapter examines the colonial-apartheid context arguing that it is crucial to understanding the development of South Africa’s legal education system and its contestations in the apartheid’s wake. The chapter concludes by outlining some of the contemporary challenges facing legal education in South Africa amid state-led efforts to facilitate demographic and substantive transformation.
Isolation and Globalization
Authors: Law David S.
Published: June 2022

There may be no place in the contemporary world where the global collides more acutely with the local than the Kingdom of Bhutan. On the one hand, it is keen to preserve its culture and traditions both as an end in and of itself, and as a means of underwriting social and political stability. On the other hand, it has drawn extensively on foreign inspiration and models in constructing its legal system and its inaugural law school. Given that the very idea of a legal system for dispute resolution sits uneasily with longstanding traditions of community-based mediation, the introduction of foreign models of legal education cannot help but occupy treacherous ground. Nor is there a clearer example of globalization at war with itself. The "global" does not speak with a unified voice in Bhutan: from the training of lawyers in India to the funding of legal education by US law firms, the influences are disparate, and the process of integrating and reconciling them has barely begun. The globalization of legal education in Bhutan cannot be described as imposed: it occurs free of a colonial legacy, under steady-handed, high-legitimacy local leadership. Nevertheless, the case of Bhutan highlights the extent to which globalization is not a matter of choice but of necessity. In the absence of raw materials for constructing a system of law or legal education that could plausibly described as autochthonous, resistance to foreign models is not an option, and necessity is the mother of imitation.
“Have Law Books, Computer, Simulations—Will Travel”
Authors: Menkel-Meadow Carrie
Published: June 2022

This chapter chronicles the “transnationalization” of some of the law professoriate. It highlights the extent to which both faculty and students can study law in more than one country and legal system, transforming their knowledge of the world and their ability to be well-educated professionals by learning, teaching and developing transnational legal knowledge in different venues and with different teaching modalities. It also suggests that the globalization of legal education can occur domestically by study of international and transnational law in one’s own country, provided that classes, teaching materials, and modalities of education are diverse, both demographically and intellectually. Nevertheless, truly authentic transnational and comparative legal understanding should provide for some education to occur outside of one’s own home. The chapter reflects on the author’s own experiences of teaching in twenty-six countries, on five continents, and in several of the United States’ largest LLM programs. The chapter explains and illustrates how transnational legal education takes many forms, such as study abroad programs for students, domestic courses with diverse student bodies (including foreign graduate and undergraduate students, e.g. LLMs and JDs in the same class), faculty exchanges, international research projects and graduate law programs. Description of some programs are provided, such as Georgetown’s Center for Transnational Legal Studies (in London), INCAE (graduate program for legal studies in Central America), study abroad programs sponsored by more than one law school (e.g. in Argentina) and courses in transnational or globalized law in countries with many international (or “foreign” to the host country) students (e.g. NUS in Singapore and many others). The article concludes with a plea for contextually rich and professionally diverse transnational legal education. Transnational legal education is not only legal, it is cultural.
The Ritual of Black Armed Resistance
Authors: Gaskew Tony
Published: June 2022

This chapter looks at police abolition through the perspective of the Black Radical Tradition. It frames the Black Radical Tradition as both an intergenerational birthright and a spiritual inheritance. The transitional moment from childhood that the chapter recounts is, quite explicitly, a rejection of the ideology (and myth) that independence is the measure of a person. Indeed, the chapter embraces the principle of interdependence—not independence—as a core moral virtue and a powerful means for liberation. The chapter argues that African Americans have little choice but to use violence to protect themselves against systematic state repression. This argument for armed self-defense explicitly takes on the tradition of Black nonviolent resistance as ineffective and too accommodating, noting that armed resistance has long been an important feature of the civil rights movement.
Is Violence the Answer?
Authors: Ryckman Kirssa Cline
Published: June 2022

This chapter analyzes whether collective violence can be justifiable, whether violence might be the answer. To be sure, the adoption of violent tactics invites greater costs. There is a significant likelihood of being killed in an armed battle against the state, and research consistently shows that violent movements generate higher levels of repression than their nonviolent counterparts. However, nonviolence raises its own ethical dilemmas. This begs the question of whether nonviolent resistance is worth the short-term costs of repression, given that protesters have no weapons with which to resist state violence. Moreover, is it worth the potential long-term costs of failure? To unpack this dilemma, the chapter first considers why nonviolent action is presented as both the morally and strategically superior approach to achieve the movement's long-term goals. It then suggests that violence should not be a proactive strategy, but may be a tactic of last resort.
Allies Out Front
Authors: Myers Daniel J.
Published: June 2022

This chapter examines the question of gender identities and the perceived legitimacy of allies in leadership roles of organizations. Reflecting on his experiences as a lifelong activist for LGBTQ rights, the author recounts a period of time as an “ally in leadership” for Queer Nation when a student, and how these experiences helped with an understanding of how to be a better ally. Legitimacy in social movements depends heavily on endorsement from the membership, and such endorsements depend, in turn, on identity markers. In the context of LGBTQ rights movements, these identity markers are necessarily gendered. Because the Queer Nation movement needed people to claim their identities as queer folks, having straight leaders with gender markers of privilege and advantage would have undermined the purpose of a social movement designed to empower and defend the rights of those whose gender identity markers rendered them marginalized and oppressed within a wider society.
Organizing Dilemmas across U.S.-Based Social Justice Movement Spaces
Authors: gill alicia sanchez
Published: June 2022

This chapter examines how funding from influential donors can play a pivotal role in activism, while also introducing risks. These risks include the co-optation of the mission, the sidelining of experiential knowledge and activist voices, and the dilution of the core message. Focusing on INCITE!, a network of radical feminists of color, the chapter picks up the conversation around the gendered dilemmas of leadership in movement spaces. The chapter invites a series of essays, in the style of self-reflective narratives, which elevate the stories of leaders who live at the intersections of many marginalized identities. In the crucible of their struggles, it presents the internal conflicts faced by movement leaders with intersectional identities as they are confronted with competing needs and demands from the many marginalized groups with whom they identify.
Dilemmas in Action Where Rule of Law Conflicts with Justice
Authors: Hurwitz Deena R.
Published: June 2022

This chapter evaluates the lived-experience dilemmas that emerge from working alongside vulnerable communities. The work of human rights advocates and lawyers—who work in places where the rule of law is compromised, whether in a country ruled by a dictator or an ostensibly liberal democracy governed by national security or military law—presents a number of ethical dilemmas that arise when advocates encounter the manipulation of law for political ends. These are dilemmas of personal conscience and of professional responsibility, of moral accountability and complicity—and how that is defined, by and for whom. What happens when a vulnerable local partner asks a human rights lawyer or advocate to carry sensitive documents, letters, notes, or photographs? How forthright should one be with the security forces and border personnel of a rights-abusing state? Should one answer truthfully as a matter of principle, although it may compromise the safety of colleagues, clients, friends? These questions strike at the core of two major themes of this book, as those seeking social change balance the well-being of the vulnerable people they hope to serve with the realities of state violence and the constraints of oppressive institutions.
Threading the Needle
Authors: Verdeja Ernesto
Published: June 2022

This chapter addresses the wicked problems at the heart of international mass atrocity prevention work. Today this is characterized by a complex assortment of human rights NGOs, governments, and regional actors like the United Nations, African Union, European Union, and many other institutions. Drawing on interviews with practitioners, prior scholarship, and prevention practice, the chapter sketches a general ethical framework for atrocity prevention. This exercise highlights key ethical dilemmas: challenges concerning representation (who speaks for the vulnerable?), practical issues around the use of force to protect civilians, and compromising with perpetrators in order to stop massacres. The chapter concludes with a set of general reflective guidelines that help limit the scope of these dilemmas, even if they cannot be eliminated.
The Ethics of Transitional Justice
Authors: Murithi Tim
Published: June 2022

This chapter maps ethical dilemmas surrounding transitional justice. Transitional justice itself might be best thought of as a wicked problem, since it involves thinking about how societies moving away from authoritarianism or armed conflict to peace and democratic rule reckon with legacies of violence and impunity. The author’s work in South Africa provides a vantage point to examine profound problems in a number of contexts. These include questions of how to balance possibly divisive demands for accountability and economic redistribution with calls for societal reconciliation, which may happen at the expense of victims and historically marginalized groups. These dilemmas become especially acute when incoming political leaders are constrained in their ability to address the past. A failure to look back may limit the use of institutions like truth and reconciliation commissions to engage with issues of justice, reconciliation, and trauma.
Consent, Inclusivity, and Local Voices
Authors: Paczyńska Agnieszka , Hirsch Susan F.
Published: June 2022

This chapter reflects on the ethical dilemmas surrounding teaching about violence and peace in conflict zones, whether in surrounding communities or in faraway locales. Drawing on the increasingly common use of experiential learning and field-based courses, it discusses how students with strong normative commitments but limited understandings of the world find their assumptions challenged and questioned in the field, where problems and possible solutions are much more complex than they may have expected. The chapter then highlights a host of wicked problems and provides concrete suggestions on how to make field courses more ethically reflective, noting the importance of consent, inclusivity, and listening to local voices. The result is an approach that underscores the value of field experience while also encouraging humility and awareness of the claims and agency of local actors. These dilemmas and responses are relevant well beyond the academy, as they apply to any field-based efforts, whether undertaken by researchers or activists.
Settling on Dangerous Ground
Authors: Poling Gregory B.
Published: June 2022

This chapter tells the story of early PRC, ROC, French, South Vietnamese, and Philippine jockeying for position in the Paracel and Spratly Islands. It relates the exploits of Morton Meads and Tomás Cloma, who in 1955 and 1956 escalated tensions between U.S. allies the ROC, Philippines, and South Vietnam with their schemes to get rich by exploiting the Spratlys. The chapter tracks the U.S. response to these and subsequent developments in the Dangerous Ground. It concludes with the 1974 Battle of the Paracels, during which PRC forces seized the western half of the Paracels from South Vietnam, catching the United States flat-footed.
Problems with Subjective Well-Being
Authors: Fabian Mark
Published: June 2022

While subjective well-being scholarship has its merits, it is not without its weaknesses, and these are the subject of this chapter. While the definition and approach of the field were appropriate in its historical context, they are inappropriate and indeed problematic for applications in public policy. In particular, this chapter demonstrates that the field is naive about the normative implications of “wellbeing” theories and that its measurement instruments lack precision. Both of these faults find their origins in the field’s atheoretic inclinations and operationalist epistemology. It is time to replace this with a more realist epistemology. That requires a thorough theory of subjective wellbeing that engages extensively with normativity, which this book provides.
The Analytical Philosophy of Wellbeing
Authors: Fabian Mark
Published: June 2022

The study of subjective wellbeing is dominated by two traditions: the psychological and philosophical. If the psychological is deficient, it makes sense to look for solutions in the philosophical. As such, this chapter begins with a thorough but not exhaustive review of the principal philosophical theories of wellbeing: mental state, objective list, preference satisfaction, eudaimonic, and subjectivist. As philosophers are predominantly concerned with the evaluative character of wellbeing, a key benefit of this exercise is that it sensitizes us to the complex value judgments that must be made when defining wellbeing. However, the philosophical tradition has its own problems. In particular, its tendency to delineate and classify has led it to overlook complementarities and overlaps between supposedly competing theories. And its disinterest in “applied” questions has left the practical issue of how you get wellbeing largely investigated, despite the insights it provides regarding what wellbeing is.
Measuring Subjective Wellbeing
Authors: Fabian Mark
Published: June 2022

How do you measure a construct as complex as subjective wellbeing? The first part of this chapter reviews the many tools available for measuring each dimension of the construct, as well as the well-being profile—a new measure that holds some promise for capturing subjective wellbeing holistically in only fifteen questions. The second part of the chapter then explains why even fifteen questions is likely too long for many applications in policy and social science. Life satisfaction scales hold a great deal of promise as a unidimensional and sufficiently cardinal measure of subjective wellbeing for these applications. However, there are several concerns about these scales, notably inconsistent scale use across respondents or within respondents over time, that need to be investigated more thoroughly. The chapter provides a conceptual analysis of these concerns and uses them to differentiate adaptation, scale-norming, and reference point shifts.
Dictatorship, Democracy, and the Bomb in South Asia
Authors: Clary Christopher
Published: June 2022

The new military dictatorship of Mohammad Zia ul-Haq ousted Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but India-Pakistan relations did not revert to overt hostility. Crises in 1984, 1986–1987, and 1990 were successfully de-escalated, but the 1986–1987 Brasstacks crisis and the 1990 crisis showed signs of unnecessary escalation as a result of dysfunctional decision-making in India and Pakistan, respectively. Toward the end of the 1980s, the Punjab and later Kashmir insurgencies contributed to a substantial worsening of India-Pakistan relations in the 1990s. Civil-military discord in Pakistan contributed to the catastrophic failure of the Lahore process undertaken by Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif, producing instead the 1999 Kargil War. Despite theories of nuclear peace, mutual possession of nuclear weapons did not produce rapprochement or conflict resolution in Asia.
The Society of Jesus as the Ideal Expression of Unity and Catholicity
Authors: DeMeuse Eric J.
Published: June 2022

This chapter argues that it is in the charism of the Society of Jesus that Suárez sees the dynamic between Christic unity and missional catholicity most fully lived out in the practice of the Church. Though Suárez considers the Society only a specific determination of the ecclesial way of life, he also considers it not just any determination, but the most excellent determination. This chapter thus looks particularly at how Suárez understands the unity and universality of the Society of Jesus in the light of his ecclesiology, and how the unity and universality of the Society is expressive of the unity and catholicity of the Church.
Conclusion
Authors: DeMeuse Eric J.
Published: June 2022

This chapter reassesses Suárez’s legacy and the contribution he makes to the current ecclesiological conversation. It begins by tracing the legacy of Suárez’s ecclesiology on the question of the ecclesial status of the baptized children of heretics through the papacy of Benedict XIV and into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This question is highlighted because it is (1) crucial for ecumenism and (2) often seen as a point of rupture between Tridentine Catholicism and the ecclesiology of Vatican II. It is argued that the delineation of this legacy significantly narrows the supposed chasm between early modernity and Vatican II. In addition, this chapter also suggests ways that Suárez can contribute to our current ecclesiological conversation on at least two fronts: the definition of the Church and the relationship between unity and missional catholicity.
Clashing Kingdoms
Authors: Saiya Nilay
Published: June 2022

This chapter contrasts worldly kingdoms with the “kingdom of the cross.” It makes the case that both kingdoms are based on contradictory virtues: human kingdoms on power, violence, and distinctiveness between nations; the kingdom of the cross on humility, nonviolence, and inclusivity. Both kingdoms also pursue incongruous goals—survival and security in the case of the kingdom of the world and redemption through self-sacrifice in the case of the kingdom of the cross. That these kingdoms espouse conflicting virtues in service to contradictory goals strongly suggests an inherent and constant tension between church and state and that sustained cooperation between them will be incredibly difficult if the church is to remain true to its vocation.
Sowing in Shalom
Authors: Saiya Nilay
Published: June 2022

Christian communities around the world, drawing on their texts, traditions, and practices, have actively worked toward the healing of their societies in the aftermath of atrocity, playing constructive roles in peacemaking, peacebuilding, and reconciliation in the wake of civil war, genocide, and terrorism. This chapter examines some of the most important of these endeavors in the post–Cold War world. It argues that Christians have been instrumental in peace and reconciliation efforts when they have retained their distance from the state, thus preserving their good standing in society and their ability to contribute positively to such efforts. On the other hand, when Christianity has partnered with repressive regimes, the church itself has been complicit in the abuses of the state. Churches in this position compromise their spiritual authority and find it difficult to help their societies heal from mass injustice.
Introduction
Authors: MA Xiao
Published: June 2022

The chapter begins by presenting the main puzzles of the book: What are the workings of political processes and logics that govern the planning and construction of China’s high-speed railway? What accounts for the significant geographical and temporal variations in the allocation of investments in high-speed rail infrastructure? The chapter analyzes the two prominent strands of theories in distributive politics, namely loyalty purchasing and technocratic solutions, and points out their limitations in explaining the high-speed railway project. It then proposes localized bargaining as an alternative explanation and details the data and methods employed to test the argument. The chapter ends with the argument’s theoretical contributions and a chapter plan.
Introduction
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

In June 2014, the Islamic State (IS) declared itself the return of the global “caliphate.” In doing so, it demanded--and received--pledges of allegiance, or bayah, from jihadist groups around the world and began integrating them as wilayat, or provinces. Many of these new “provinces” were in Africa. Yet, even despite the decline of the Islamic State in 2019, its various African provinces remained loyal, and new provinces were created. Why did these African provinces retain loyalty to a fading parent group?
After explaining the origins of the Islamic State and its attraction for would-be members, this chapter lays the theoretical groundwork to answer the above. It argues that the rise of the Islamic State “democratized” the choices in affiliation for aspiring jihadist groups. But in trying to become formal IS affiliates, these groups could also prove a liability for Islamic State Central, whose process for “validating the utility” of aspiring affiliates often shifted over time. Once accepted, however, affiliates found themselves to be functionally “sovereign” while nominally “subordinate” to Islamic State Central. Yet, because the reputational benefits from affiliation with the one-time glories of IS Central endured even after its own defeat, African provinces remained loyal.
The Islamic State In Libya
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

The Islamic State’s rise in Libya was superlative and unique on the Africa continent: by al-Baghdadi’s death in October 2019, its one-time apogee had fallen to become a neutered version of its former self. Arising in 2014 when Libyans returning as foreign fighters in the Syrian civil war merged with Al-Qaeda sympathetic, pro-sharia groups in the chaotic post-Qaddafi landscape of Libya, a combination of ideological affinity and encouragement and assistance from the Islamic State Central led to the democratization of jihad. Soon, not one, but three Islamic State provinces would emerge in Libya: for IS Central, their elevation to provincial statuses--proof of affiliate utility validation--appeared to be a foregone conclusion, as it had sent envoys, finances, and arms to the aspirant groups as they conceptualized their stand up. Once Libya’s three official provinces emerged, they undertook varying degrees of territorial control, governance, and violence that would go unrivaled almost anywhere else on the continent, though little evidence exists to show a profoundly enduring connection with IS Central, typical of sovereign subordinates.
The Islamic State in Algeria
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

The Islamic State’s "Wilayat Jazair," or Algeria Province, emerged as one of the earliest jihadist groups to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi and one of the first three on the African continent to be declared a wilaya. An ambitious deputy of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, dissatisfied with the direction of the group and his own position, defected soon after al-Baghdadi announced the caliphate, underscoring how IS served to “democratize jihad” in the Al-Qaeda-dominated Algerian landscape. Quickly, these militants demonstrated their loyalty to IS Central with the grisly murder of a French hiking guide, Hervé Gourdel, seemingly validating their utility as an affiliate to the Islamic State Central through the reproduction of the kind of ultra-violence for which IS had become so infamous. While provincial status would indeed follow shortly thereafter, the killing, combined with their rise as an official Islamic State province, also earned Wilayat Jazair an aggressive crackdown by Algerian security forces. As its Algerian province struggled, it was met with little assistance from IS Central. Like most other African provinces, Algeria was a true “sovereign subordinate,” which, despite new groups’ efforts at revivification, would be a defunct failure by al-Baghdadi's death.
The Islamic State in Tunisia
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

In Tunisia, a country whose local Islamist movement was long integrated into the global jihadist scene, a seemingly viable and eager outfit of Islamic State sympathizers would emerge but, despite efforts, would fail to gain acceptance as an official Islamic State province. With a pro-Islamist tide emerging in the country following the Arab Uprisings in 2011, members of Ansar al-Sharia Tunisia would by 2014 coalesce into the Al-Qaeda-oriented Katibat Uqba Bin Nafi, finding purchase in the newly emerged Islamic State Central’s profile, a nod, yet again, to the ways that the latter's rise would serve to “democratize jihad.” Yet the would-be wilaya in Tunisia would never come to be: despite several high-profile attacks throughout 2015 and 2016, the greatest distinction that Tunisia's Islamic State sympathizers gained was to be called “Jund al-Khilafa,” or “soldiers of the caliphate,” never officially achieving the coveted provincial status to prove their utility to the Islamic State Central. With the process of “affiliate utility validation” remaining unfulfilled, sympathizers of the Islamic State in Tunisia remained essentially sovereign from--rather than in any way meaningfully subordinate to--the Islamic State Central.
The Islamic State’s West Africa Province—Greater Sahara
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

For years, a generally ignored Islamic State-sympathetic insurgency, then known as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), operated at the crossroads of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso: by al-Baghdadi’s death, the group would become a new wing of the northeastern Nigeria-based Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), the former subsequently referred to as ISWAP - Greater Sahara (ISWAP - GS). While certainly never the largest or most ambitious of the Islamic State’s African affiliates, ISGS would have bouts of notoriety throughout its lifecycle. Created when an aspirant jihadi leader originally from Western Sahara broke away from a succession of Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups as the Islamic State’s presence “democratized jihad,” the 2015 iteration of ISGS found it difficult to even gain recognition from IS Central, much less attain “affiliate utility validation.” Nearly four years after its initial pledge of bayah, by mid-2019, months before al-Baghdadi’s death, the group would finally be elevated in the IS hierarchy. While never becoming its own province, ISGS's general trajectory was certainly one of a go-it-alone sovereign subordinate: though evidence of increased interactions with IS Central emerged later in its lifecycle, for the most part, it remained very much disconnected from the core.
The Islamic State in Somalia
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

With the Islamic State Central’s rise, the Al-Qaeda-rife jihadist landscape of Somalia, thoroughly dominated by Al-Shabaab, was “democratized” when a mid-level, European-reared Al-Shabaab ideologue, Abdulqadir Mumin, having grown weary of his inability to gain more prominence in the group, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State Central in 2015. IS Central’s preference instead to entice Al-Shabaab away from Al-Qaeda, combined with the generally remote and negligible initial presence of Mumin's would-be group, meant that “affiliate utility validation” would take years to occur: for Mumin’s eventual province, it was a much more prolonged process than for almost any other IS African wilayat. As was typical for the Islamic State’s other less powerful provinces and non-province affiliates in Africa, though some instances of communication and financial transfers have been evidenced, little in the way of direct coordination with IS Central--beyond the latter’s claiming of IS Somalia’s operations in its media--have been forthcoming, underlining IS Somalia’s existence as a sovereign subordinate.
The Islamic State’s Central Africa Province—Drc
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

The Islamic State’s Central Africa Province (ISCAP) is the Islamic State’s newest province--both in Africa and globally--and the only province declared after the fall of Baghuz in March 2019. ISCAP is composed of two “wings”: one in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the other in northern Mozambique. ISCAP’s Congolese wing, (ISCAP - Congo) originated from the re-branding of a longstanding, Ugandan-led Islamist insurgency known as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). By granting the ADF “affiliate utility validation” and elevating to a wing of its new Central African Province in April 2019, the Islamic State was able to ostensibly expand into new territories, helping it to retain its preeminence within the global jihadist sphere despite the reputational losses it might otherwise have suffered following its defeats in the core territories which made it so infamous. The relationship between the Islamic State Central and ISCAP–Congo has seen the former offering tangible--though still limited--assistance as its “sovereign subordinate” Congolese affiliate has come under significant military pressure. Though a newcomer to the scene, by al-Baghdadi’s death, ISCAP–Congo remained among the Islamic State’s most potent and deadly affiliated insurgencies.
Conclusion
Authors: Warner Jason , O’farrell Ryan , Nsaibia Héni , Cummings Ryan
Published: June 2022

2019 would prove a challenging year for Islamic State with the loss of its last stretch of territory in Syria in March, and the death of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October. Still, none of its affiliates in Africa renounced their ties, and most would confirm their pledges of allegiance. Their continued attraction to IS’s brand can be partially explained by the reputational rather than material benefits offered by IS’s “democratization” of choice for affiliation. Local affiliate leaders who chose Islamic State over Al-Qaeda could not so easily reverse their decisions, and seldom had reason to renounce their ties with its apocryphal caliphate despite its decline. Islamic State Central’s own process of validating the utility of accepting new affiliates would also change over time as its own fortunes ebbed and flowed. Initially accepting affiliates as provinces with little discrimination, IS became discerning at its height, seeking to limit the reputational risks of faltering aspirant provinces, before loosening its rubrics once again as its own fortunes waned. Ultimately, the operational sovereignty of Islamic State’s African subordinates would prove most crucial for retaining their allegiance, as IS’s own declining fortunes had limited material or operational impact on its affiliates.
Between Two Uprisings
Authors: Allam Nermin , Berman Chantal , Clarke Killian , Schwedler Jillian
Published: June 2022

While much of the MENA scholarship through the 2000s focused on authoritarianism, a significant and growing literature explores the dynamics of popular protest. Many of the early analyses of the uprisings drew heavily on classical literatures on social movement theory and contentious politics, but within a few years MENA scholars were pushing forward newer and more creative debates that questioned how political scientists studied how ordinary people mobilized. This chapter surveys that literature and then examines three areas in which studies of MENA protests and opposition have advanced broader theoretical knowledge: the political role of routine protests and seeming non-events, the affective (e.g., emotional) dimensions of protests, and the outcomes of protest beyond questions of immediate success and failure. These new approaches helped scholars make better make sense of the 2018–19 uprisings in the region and highlight the contributions of MENA specialists to the wider scholarship on protests.
International Relations and Regional (In)security
Authors: Darwich May , Gause F. Gregory , Hazbun Waleed , Ryan Curtis , Valbjørn Morten
Published: June 2022

Since the Arab uprisings, new dynamics of insecurity have cleaved the MENA, tugging at the conceptual premise in how this regional subsystem of interstate relations—that is, Middle East international relations (IR)—operates in an era of globalization. Interfacing with conventional IR theories, the chapter shows the retreat of American hegemony as a historical rupture from a unipolar world order. It stresses that new alliances and rivalries, from the Syrian-Iranian coalition to the Saudi-Qatari split, do not comport with existing assumptions for how states should behave when attempting to balance power and project their interests. Emergent conflicts such as proxy wars and sectarianized disputes force us to rethink the origins and duration of violence. All of this makes the study of security itself, long the organizing theme of classical IR, a loaded task. Events in the MENA are teaching theorists to move beyond Western-centric views about what makes states fundamentally secure or insecure.
The Politics of Identity and Sectarianism
Authors: Haddad Fanar , Hintz Lisel , Majed Rima , Matthiesen Toby , Salloukh Bassel F. , Siegel Alexandra A.
Published: June 2022

The Arab uprisings left an indelible mark on the politics of identity in the Middle East. However, the ways that identities have formed, morphed, and translated into action rebuff many theoretical expectations drawn from political science. Sectarian sentiments have seemed to dominate the regional public sphere, but they do not engender predictable patterns of mobilization, conflict, or congregation among social movements and political governments. This chapter hence provides a deep, reflective, and comparatively informed dive into sectarian identity and the notion of sectarianism. It illustrates the different approaches taken by political scientists in defining these terms and accentuates the importance of moving beyond existing concepts to deconstruct how political understandings of identity arise in historical context. It suggests that creative research among political science should aim as much to explore not just sectarianization but also de-sectarianization as the next trend that could reshape social and political forces in the region.
Toward a Relational Approach to Local Politics
Authors: Clark Janine A. , El-Kazaz Sarah , Harb Mona , Salman Lana
Published: June 2022

The Arab uprisings of 2011–12 brought into stark relief the fact that neither states nor societies in the Middle East were monolithic units. Instead, the region shows remarkable variation in terms of administration, governance, and development at the local level. Hence, the study of local politics—often termed “subnational politics” in mainstream political science—in its own right has gained greater urgency. This chapter argues that this new field of research ought to be conceptualized in relation to localities and the study of politics at multiple scales. This builds on methodological and disciplinary transformations, namely the growing recognition of the importance of localized processes as well as the adoption of interdisciplinary analytical frames, including the spatial turn in conceptualizing political processes. The chapter therefore breaks the encumbering label of “subnational politics” in favor of “local politics,” thereby embracing the productivity of localities and the dynamism of “scalar politics.”