Protection at the Margins

David T. Buckley is the Paul Weber Endowed Chair of Politics, Science, and Religion at University of Louisville, where he also directs the University's Center for Asian Democracy. He is the author of Blessing America First: Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration (2024) and Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal and the Philippines (2017). Steven Brooke is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Director of the Middle East Studies program at University of Wisconsin, Madison and a member of the Project on Middle East Political Science steering committee. His book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage (2019) received the APSA Middle East section award for best book by a first-time author.

• List of figures; List of tables; List of abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Part I. Populist State Violence and Protection at the Margins: Introduction; 1. A theory of community protection; Part II. Commitment, Capacity, and Parish Response: 2. Moral commitment, risk tolerance, and universalist counternarratives; 3. Organizational capacity, trusted networks, and local access; 4. Profiles of parish mobilization; Part III. Interventions and Their Audiences: 5. Shaping implementation by street-level bureaucrats; 6. Cultivating credible partnerships with civil society; 7. Rebuilding community among the local public; Part IV. The Boundaries of Protection: 8. Denominational differences and ecologies of drug war violence; 9. Moral authority, societal cleavages, and barriers to intervention in Brazil and the US; Conclusion: afterlives of the Philippine drug war.

'In this terrific and humane book, Buckley and Brooke demonstrate how committed religious actors operating through locally effective institutions can protect people from state violence. Through careful theorization and impressive multi-pronged field research, the authors identify a set of mechanisms for how meso-level actors mitigate civilian abuse. The book has profound implications not only for the study of large-scale political violence outside armed conflict, but also for the study of civil society and the power of principled action in the face of dangerous politics.' Scott Straus, University of California, Berkeley