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In tenth century Khurasan and Transoxania, at the frontier of the Iranian cultural world, mythical and historical narratives such as the Shahnama helped to shape and maintain a sense of group Iranian identity for the Samanids and other Iranian Islamic dynasties. The Shahnama can be considered what narrative theorist Margaret Somers terms an "ontological narrative." These narratives helped Islamic dynasties such as the Samanids understand what it meant to be Iranian, and also became sources of identity for their Arab and Turkic neighbors. The term "Iran," or "Iranshahr" as the empire of the Sasanians was known (224-651 CE), refers to a political unity which did not exist in the domains of the Samanids. How did such a concept, removed from its original geography, inform cultural identities? To what extent was the idea of "Iran" tied to a pre-Islamic geographical, political, and Zoroastrian religious concept, and how was it reinterpreted in a post-Abbasid world?If the Shahnama tells the stories of a formerly unified Iran, how was this concept reinterpreted in a geographically fractured and religiously changing world? When delving into the history of Khurasan and Transoxania, there are certain unanswered questions about language, history, and literature during the New Persian Renaissance that one must keep in mind as guiding questions:• Why was the time ripe for a resurgence of Persian language and literature? • Why were the lands of Khurasan and Transoxania the seeming location of this linguistic and literary movement?• To what extent was language tied to individual, group, or cultural "identity"?Shahnama and prose histories such as those of Bal'ami, Gardizi, and Beyhaqi helped lay the foundation for identities that have persisted until present day. This is not to say that there is a static Iranian identity that has existed since some "medieval" creation. Instead, ontological narrativity allows for a fluid and dynamic sense of identity. It is the interplay between narrative and lived experience that creates a sense of who one and one's society are, and it was the Shahnama that was the preeminent such narrative for the Eastern Islamic world after the New Persian Renaissance.

Abstract
Why do some states allocate more resources to their military than others? Governments are likely to perceive acute threats to their authority and legitimacy when they face insurgencies in which rebel groups earn significant revenues from the exploitation of natural resources. In response, governments allocate greater amounts to their military budgets. Using data on the exploitation of natural resources by rebel groups and defense spending for states around the world, I find that states where rebel groups profit from natural resources allocate more to their defense budgets than other states. This finding holds even after controlling for the presence of civil conflict itself. The study suggests that rebel exploitation of resources may have an indirect impact on interstate relations: If states indeed face a security dilemma, then increased spending resulting from these internal dynamics is likely to exacerbate the problem.

Why do some states allocate more resources to their military than others? Governments are likely to perceive acute threats to their authority and legitimacy when they face insurgencies in which rebel groups earn significant revenues from the exploitation of natural resources. In response, governments allocate greater amounts to their military budgets. Using data on the exploitation of natural resources by rebel groups and defense spending for states around the world, I find that states where rebel groups profit from natural resources allocate more to their defense budgets than other states. This finding holds even after controlling for the presence of civil conflict itself. The study suggests that rebel exploitation of resources may have an indirect impact on interstate relations: If states indeed face a security dilemma, then increased spending resulting from these internal dynamics is likely to exacerbate the problem.

Why do challengers attack some states that have allies, while avoiding conflict with others? This article builds upon previous research by arguing that parity in the observable capabilities of opposing states and their allies generates greater uncertainty and miscalculations on the part of challengers, which leads to a higher probability of conflict. Unlike previous research, however, this article argues that military alliances among democracies are better able to overcome this uncertainty, making power distributions largely irrelevant. The results demonstrate that uncertainty generated at power parity is mitigated when a target state's allies are more democratic, resulting in no overall change in the probability of conflict. This study therefore emphasizes that the effectiveness of military alliances lies not necessarily in their aggregation of power, but in their ability to co-ordinate their power and communicate this co-ordination to potential challengers.

Existing scholarly research on terrorism has largely ignored the role of international relations and its effects on patterns of terrorism. This study argues that strategic interstate relationships can affect the amount of terrorism that a state experiences and should be considered along with "traditional" determinants of terrorism, such as domestic institutional and macroeconomic variables. The study specifically looks at state sponsorship of terrorism, arguing that while we cannot reliably identify state sponsors of terror, we can indirectly observe relevant evidence of state sponsorship. To support this claim, the study examines the annual number of transnational terrorist attacks that occurred in all countries during the period 1975–2003. The results demonstrate that states involved in ongoing rivalries with other states are the victims of more terrorist attacks than states that are not involved in such hostile interstate relationships.

Militant groups often use violence, perversely, to gain attention and resources. In this book, the authors analyze how terrorist and rebel organizations compete with one another to secure funding and supporters. The authors develop a strategic model of competitive violence among militant groups and test the model's implications with statistical analysis and case studies. A series of model extensions allow the authors to incorporate the full range of strategic actors, focusing in particular on government efforts to counter and deter violence. The results indicate that the direct effects of competition are not as clear as they may seem, and interventions to alter competitive incentives may backfire if states are not careful. This is a timely contribution to a growing body of political economy research on militant group fragmentation, rivalry, fratricide and demonstrative violence.

Explanations for the democratic peace have developed along two broad lines: those that focus on democratic-specific mechanisms and those that focus on institutional similarity mechanisms. We test these competing mechanisms against each other by examining a range of regime types and a variety of institutional mechanisms, and for the first time, test them in logistic multiple regression models of rivalry onset using three rivalry datasets. Our comparative test of the two approaches largely justifies democratic-specific explanations for the democratic peace. That is, more than any other regime pairing, two democracies are less likely to engage in a rivalry. We also find some evidence that socialist single-party dyads are less likely to experience rivalry than other dyads, but overall the support for a broader institutional similarity peace is quite limited. (International Interactions/ FUB 2011)