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This chapter traces the rise of “the wise colonel” Junji Kikawa, a veteran of the Japanese army, who became leader of the secret society Shindō Renmei, or “League of Subjects of the Imperial Way,” that violently enforced the narrative of Japanese victory in the war. Under his leadership, the kachigumi, or “victorists,” set up a propaganda machine directed inward to the Japanese community, and which marked for death any makegumi, or “defeatist,” who contradicted them. Shindō Renmei exploited the power vacuum left when Japan withdrew its embassy and consular officials, leaving their immigrant community to its own fate. Meanwhile, Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo worsened matters by banning their access to print media, radio, or gathering together.

Hawkes explores Dwayne Alexander Smith’s 2014 novel, Forty Acres, contending that it pushes against traditional historical and speculative fiction by questioning which realities are possible if people try to “fix” rather than merely critique history. If black rage, or “black noise” in the novel, represents a psychological extension of US slavery in the twenty-first century, then the cure that the characters in the novel envision is a return to the moment where the illness began by avenging their ancestors who were captured and enslaved. That revenge results in the establishment of a secret society of successful black men who kidnap and enslave white people. Drawing on legal theories of revenge and retribution, Hawkes examines Forty Acres as a “speculative revenge narrative” and asks how one can decide who is a worthy recipient of punishment, how Smith engages with speculative fiction to tell this story, and how the text considers US slavery and its complex aftermath.

Community policing is neither foreign nor novel to Africa. Long before the coming of the Europeans, the traditional Igbo society of what is now Southeastern Nigeria (Igboland) had devised means for curbing and preventing crime, using primarily the age grade system and masquerade secret society. These approaches were very effective in enabling the pre-colonial Igbo society not only in fighting crime, but also in preventing it. However, modern governance systems have generally replaced traditional systems, even when the latter were very effective. Given the current security challenges in contemporary Nigerian society, there is a need to revisit this model of community policing for the purpose of preventing and curbing crimes such as terrorism, insurgency, armed robbery, commercial hostage taking, militancy and oil theft. This chapter suggests strategies for adapting Igbo community policing to present-day Nigeria.

One Sunday at around noon one day in 2014, Maman Therese (a fictive name) arrived in the compound where I live when I carry out fieldwork. She often dropped by to greet my host mother. That day, I noticed that she was carrying a DVD, which, as I learned, she had received from one of her girlfriends at church. She wanted to hear my host brother’s opinion about the content. This married woman with four children is in her late thirties and works as a nanny in the school that one of her daughters attends. Since I first met her in 2003, I have always known her to visit the Church of the Awakening (a type of Pentecostal-charismatic church). With a smile that seemed to beg for apologies, Maman Therese told me that the DVD contained a clip in which some of Fally Ipupa’s music video clips—he is one of Congo’s most successful rumba musicians—are interpreted as “genre Illuminati,” a secret society in the imagination of Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) intimately connected with the world of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. I had already noticed various posts on my Congolese friends’ Facebook walls about the possible connections between Congolese musicians and this secret society. Now I was shown that these accusations also circulate on other media carriers and among people who do not remediate such messages on their Facebook accounts.

Knowledge is a cause of virtue and happiness, especially when we meet a friend. But how difficult is it to get a good friend? How can friendship and interests be different? The scissors are a metaphor for friendship defending from the outside and there is strength in the unions of friendship.

The wave of revolutions of 1848 that spread out over the European continent created a political laboratory in which ordinary citizens sought ways to make political claims and to participate in politics. In this ‘moment of madness’, the feeling was broadly felt that suddenly ‘all is possible’. Millions of Europeans seized the revolutionary moment to gather in large popular meetings and to found political clubs. The cities of Paris and Berlin were two of the main stages of 1848, both witnessing diverse patterns of political organization in the wake of their revolutions. This chapter takes both cities as a dual case study to demonstrate the experiences with forms of participation and organization, and the fluidity thereof that marked the era before the rise of political mass parties.

This chapter examines the emergence of a colonial archive on ‘native savagery’ following the panic over ‘human leopards’ in Sierra Leone in 1912. It shows how the fright of the colonial elites was charged by the regurgitation of past prejudices and experiences of violence. The colonial archive—colonial officials used to refer to ‘Thuggee’ in India as the ultimate example of native ‘savagery’—was consulted to reinforce existing racial stereotypes. The panic ultimately resulted in an explosion of anthropological literature about the ‘leopards’ being disseminated all over Britain and its Empire. As the detailed analysis of this peculiar genre of texts clearly suggests, the narratives of the ‘leopard murders’ drew on earlier prejudices about African religion and ritual, and the resulting ‘scientific’ literature in turn became an important reference point for later investigators.

This paper addresses the subjects of social media-augmented political action, the role of social media in the coordination of aggressive group behaviour and the tactics employed to counter aggression. Using examples ranging from an historical secret society to an American crime show, the paper argues that the functions frequently exploited by social media are not new, even if the tools used to execute the exploitation are. The paper employs applications of psychoanalysis—most notably Freud’s theories of group psychology and the analysis of the ego and the Lacanian Other—to discuss such topics as the hive mind, revolutions and televised violence.