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The comic book film adaptation trend ushered in by X-Men in 2000 soon developed into a full-fledged genre. Chapter Two charted the development of this genre and probed its boundaries. Identifying the conventions of these films, the chapter defined the comic-book movie as a genre that follows a vigilante or outsider character engaged in a form of revenge narrative, and is pitched at a heightened reality with a visual style marked by distinctly comic book imagery. Refining earlier genre models with a bacterial growth analogy, the development of this genre was plotted and its next phase was predicted.

The introduction offers a brief definition of a superhero using the work of Peter Coogan, and the founding definition of sovereignty in Western political philosophy as outlined by Jean Bodin. It shows that the theory of sovereignty is based on issues of legitimacy, authority, power, law, violence, and states of emergency and that as such superhero comics are ideal for analysing the concept. It argues that superhero comics can offer critical and progressive meditations on the problem of sovereignty—as can be seen in Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come—while also presenting important considerations regarding the fundamental contradiction of absolute power that lies at its heart.

This chapter examines the movement culture created by the Vigilante Committee of 1856 in San Francisco, California. It explains that for ninety days the Vigilante Executive Committee was able to draw most of the city's voters into an armed paramilitary government which executed political prisoners and adopted the ancient republican practice of ostracism. The chapter discusses the Committee's creation of a local party organization that ruled the city until the end of the Civil War, which had a lasting impact on the political life of the city for many decades.

However progressive their notions of reform, rural Americans’ anger has long found expression through violence as well as conventional politics. Class, race, religious, and ethnic resentments played a part in nearly all rural movements. The Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania advocated the killing of native people. Populist ideology contained frequent anti-Semitic references. Southern Populists also joined the Ku Klux Klan. Violence uniquely marked the American countryside from the days of the frontier.

The first half of the chapter examines poliziottesco or 'police procedural' format films whose plots invest in notions of high-level coup d'état conspiracy, arguing that such films seek, not to explain or to 'make sense' of the violent events of the 1970s, but instead to enact a ritual recognition of only partially understood, but pervasive and therefore assumed corruption. The second half examines vigilante films, which simultaneously hanker after an imagined past time of moral certainty, and amount to nihilistic assertions of the futility of fighting against a corrupt, faceless system. The assumed, taken-as-read ubiquity of corruption in these two groups of films is shown to manifest itself through seemingly minor scene-setting details and off-guard moments of background exposition, which expose preoccupations with the nation's traumatic past and the historical continuity of systematic institutional brutality.

This chapter describes the various forms of resistance that coffeehouse activists faced from the towns and bases in which they built their projects. From physical attacks on coffeehouses from local vigilantes, to targeted legal campaigns from local law enforcement, to direct shutdowns and challenges from military officials, GI activism brought a wave of negative attention from a number of different social and institutional forces. This chapter shows how the towns and cities in which coffeehouses operated had significant socioeconomic interest in maintaining their historically beneficial relationships with the American military, and thus viewed coffeehouses and GI activism with a mix of skepticism, anger, and antagonism.

This chapter traces the ideological formation surrounding a central moment in the history of American lynching, the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856. The San Francisco vigilantes helped to craft highly influential arguments about the relationship between the people and the law that would be adopted by subsequent generations of lynchers in the West, Midwest, and South. The chapter follows the historical context in which the San Francisco vigilantes and their opponents articulated their respective understandings of constitutionalism. It argues that the numbers supporting the San Francisco vigilantes were a transient political majority, acting in defiance of constitutional principle, and thus it cannot be said that their lynchings were socially positive or antidemocratic.

Starting from the premise that in studying contemporary policing practices in Africa one needs to also acknowledge the role of non-state policing actors, this chapter explores the historicity of community policing groups, or, more pejoratively, vigilante movements, in Plateau State, Nigeria. It establishes a link between the plural policing landscapes of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria, and finally takes the Vigilante Group of Nigeria as a case study to highlight contemporary features and characteristics of this plurality. One of its features is, perhaps ironically, not the absence, retreat or weakness, but rather the extension of the state.

Cook examines the context and function of the ongoing moral and cultural policing of young people and minorities in Mangaluru by vigilante Hindu groups with government complicity. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork with the city’s burgeoning population of students and underemployed youth, Cook argues that the violence is fueled by the resentment against what is seen as the cultural pollution of ‘excessive’ freedom among middle class youth. Many of the vigilantes are underemployed youth, structurally shut out from gainful employment and prestigious education. Instead they assume positions as self-appointed guardians of Indian culture and putative ‘Hindu values’, as well as protectors of young women against the seductions of western immorality, and the imagined sexual predation by men from the minority community. Cook explains this as a contradiction within neo-liberalism: a tension between the ‘Western cultural values’ that are resented by the vigilantes, and their simultaneous celebration of a neo-liberal culture of economic freedom that they hope will deliver them into a life of success. Their failure in the latter seems to fuel their commitment to combat the former.