Books in the The Ethnography of Political Violence series

Offering one of the first long-term on-the-ground ethnographies of Afghanistan since the arrival of allied forces in 2001, Kabul Carnival explores the contradictions, ambiguities, and unintended effects of the emancipatory projects designed for Afghan women and imposed by the international community.

Reverberations aims to generate new concepts and methodologies for the study of political violence and its aftermath. Essays attend to the distribution, extension, and endurance of violence across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and political imaginations.

Culture and PTSD examines the applicability of PTSD to cultural contexts beyond Europe and North America and details local responses to trauma and how they vary from PTSD as defined by the American Psychiatric Association.

One evening in 1980, a group of white friends, drinking at the Duke of Edinburgh pub on East Ham High Street, made a monstrous five-pound wager. The first person to kill a "Paki" would win the bet. Ali Akhtar Baig, a young Pakistani student who lived in the east London borough of Newham, was their chosen victim. Baig''s murder was but one incident in a wave of antiblack racial attacks that were commonplace during the crisis of race relations in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Ali Akhtar Baig''s death also catalyzed the formation of a grassroots antiracist organization, Newham Monitoring Project (NMP) that worked to transform the racist victimization of African, African Caribbean and South Asian communities into campaigns for racial justice and social change.In addition to providing a 24-hour hotline and casework services, NMP activists worked to mitigate the scourge of racial injustice that included daily racial harassment, hate crimes and antiblack police violence. Since the advent of the War on Terror, NMP widened its approach to support victims of the state''s counterterror policies, which have contributed to an unfettered surge in Islamophobia.These realities, as well as the many layers of gendered racism in contemporary Britain come to life through intimate ethnographic storytelling. The reader gets to know a broad range of east Londoners and antiracist activists whose intersecting experiences present a multifaceted portrait of British racism. Mohan Ambikaipaker examines the life experiences of these individuals through a strong theoretical lens that combines critical race theory and postcolonial studies. Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain shows how the deep processes of everyday political whiteness shape the state''s failure to provide effective remedies for ethnic, racial, and religious minorities who continue to face violence and institutional racism.

The last decade has been a transformative period in Kashmir, the hotly contested and densely militarized border territory located high in the Himalayan mountains between India and Pakistan. Suppressed and unheard, Kashmiri political aspirations were subordinated to larger geopolitical concerns—by opposing governments laying claim to Kashmir, by security experts promoting bilateral peace settlements in the region, and by academic researchers studying the conflict. But since 2008, Kashmiris who grew up in the midst of armed insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare have been deploying new strategies for challenging India''s state and military apparatus and projecting their legal and political claims for freedom from Indian rule to global audiences. Resisting Occupation in Kashmir analyzes the social and legal logic of India''s occupation of Kashmir in relation to colonialism, militarization, power, democracy, and sovereignty. It also traces how Kashmiri youth are drawing on the region''s long history of armed rebellion against Indian domination to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century.Resisting Occupation in Kashmir presents new ways of thinking and writing about Kashmir that cross conventional boundaries and point toward alternative ways of conceptualizing the past, present, and future of the region. The volume brings together junior and senior scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds who have conducted extensive fieldwork during the past decade in various regions of Kashmir. The contributors, many of whom were born and raised during the peak of the conflict in the 1990s, offer ethnographically grounded perspectives on contemporary social, legal, and political life in ways that demonstrate the multiplicity of experiences of Kashmiri communities. The essays highlight the ways in which this scholarly orientation—built through collaboration and dialogue across different kinds of borders—offers a new critical approach to Kashmir studies at this transformative and generative moment.Contributors: Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, Farrukh Faheem, Gowhar Fazili, Bruce Hoffman, Mohamad Junaid, Seema Kazi, Ershad Mahmud, Cynthia Mahmood, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia.

Culture and PTSD examines the applicability of PTSD to cultural contexts beyond Europe and North America and details local responses to trauma and how they vary from PTSD as defined by the American Psychiatric Association.

This volume of original essays tackles the dilemmas surrounding the ways in which victims and victimhood are socially, politically, and culturally constructed, asking: How do we recognize and acknowledge suffering without objectifying affected communities and individuals?

In this study of Guatemalan peasants rebuilding their lives after years in the crossfire, anthropologist Kristi Anne Stolen examines the dynamics of violence, survival strategies in situations of extreme violence, and social reconstruction in its aftermath.

On the Doorstep of Europe examines the way asylum seekers, bureaucrats, and service providers in Greece attempt to navigate the dilemmas of governance, ethics, knowledge, and sociability that emerge through this legal process.

Through a detailed ethnographic account of the everyday lives of detainees' wives in the occupied Palestinian Territory, No Place for Grief reveals the ways in which the normalization of these women's distress is intrinsically and painfully linked to the collective struggle for freedom from the occupation.

This ethnography analyzes the popularity of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India through examining the everyday acts of women activists, finding that women's ability to recruit individuals from a variety of backgrounds and the movement's willingness to accommodate a multiplicity of positions are central to understanding its expansionary power.

The first ethnography of the Eritrean struggle for independence documents the transnational dimensions of revolution and nation-building from the dual perspective of both Eritrea and its U.S. diaspora.

Tracing social, political, and economic changes among Sahrawi refugees, Sovereignty in Exile reveals the dynamics of a postcolonial liberation movement that has endured for decades in the deserts of North Africa while trying to bring about the revolutionary transformation of a society which identifies with a Bedouin past.

Kristin Conner Doughty examines how Rwandans navigated the combination of harmony and punishment in grassroots courts purportedly designed to rebuild the social fabric in the wake of the 1994 genocide.

Based on intensive fieldwork in Israel during the second intifada, this ethnographic study explores how Israeli Jews experience security in their everyday lives. When Israeli security imprints itself on individual lives, the book argues, security propagates the very fears it claims to prevent.

After El Salvador's brutal civil war ended in 1992, crime rates shot up. People began to speak of the peace as "worse than the war." This study examines how narratives of post-conflict violence, told by ordinary people, offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy.

In Child Soldiers in Africa Alcinda Honwana brings her firsthand experience with child soldiers in Angola and Mozambique to shed light on how children are recruited, what they encounter, and how they come to terms with what they have done.

This book examines how ordinary families and communities of minority groups in Sri Lanka have dealt with prolonged civil war and resulting issues as diverse as child recruitment, generational and gender conflicts, political terror, refugee camp life, ethnic nationalism, and migration and mobility.

Describes the social fabric of a rural community that has become a reservoir of soldiers for the Sri Lankan nation in the brutal war against Tamil separatists.

Moran argues that democracy is not a foreign import into Africa, but that essential aspects of what we in the West consider democratic values are part of the indigenous traditions of legitimacy and political process.

"Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."-Choice

Focusing on interpersonal dynamics during conflict in the Republic of Macedonia, Neofotistos describes how Macedonians and Albanians in the city of Skopje responded to threatening political developments, negotiated relationships of power, and promoted indeterminacy on the level of the everyday as a sense of impending war enfolded the capital.

Maoists at the Hearth details the ways that inhabitants of a hill village in central Nepal managed their everyday activities following the arrival of Maoist insurgents in the late 1990s, exploring their changing social relationships with fellow villagers and the parties to the conflict both during and after the civil war.

Challenging the notion that violence simply breeds more violence, Antonius C. G. M. Robben's provocative study argues that in Argentina violence led to trauma, and that trauma led to more violence.

In 1998, Indonesia exploded with both euphoria and violence after the fall of its longtime authoritarian ruler, Soeharto, and his New Order regime. Hope centered on establishing the rule of law, securing civilian control over the military, and ending corruption. Indonesia under Soeharto was a fundamentally insecure state. Shadowy organizations, masterminds, provocateurs, puppet masters, and other mysterious figures recalled the regime's inaugural massive anticommunist violence in 1965 and threatened to recreate those traumas in the present. Threats metamorphosed into deadly violence in a seemingly endless spiral. In Aceh province, the cycle spun out of control, and an imagined enemy came to life as armed separatist rebels. Even as state violence and systematic human rights violations were publicly exposed after Soeharto's fall, a lack of judicial accountability has perpetuated pervasive mistrust that undermines civil society.Elizabeth F. Drexler analyzes how the Indonesian state has sustained itself amid anxieties and insecurities generated by historical and human rights accounts of earlier episodes of violence. In her examination of the Aceh conflict, Drexler demonstrates the falsity of the reigning assumption of international human rights organizations that the exposure of past violence promotes accountability and reconciliation rather than the repetition of abuses. She stresses that failed human rights interventions can be more dangerous than unexamined past conflicts, since the international stage amplifies grievances and provides access for combatants to resources from outside the region. Violent conflict itself, as well as historical narratives of past violence, become critical economic and political capital, deepening the problem. The book concludes with a consideration of the improved prospects for peace in Aceh following the devastating 2004 tsunami.

Exposes the fact that slavery remains widespread in Sudan and is not grounded in the current civil war but on old prejudices between the Muslim north and the Christian south. "A shocking account of Sudanese slavery."-Crime & Justice International

Crossing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel makes eloquent use of particular Palestinian experiences as the framework for a critique of the way borders work in the modern world.

The first in-depth ethnography of the brutal regime in Burma.

In its comparative analysis of postcolonial South Africa and Algeria and its examination of narratives of ex-combatants, Making Peace with Your Enemy demonstrates how former adversaries face a similar challenge: how to extricate oneself from colonial domination and the violence of war in order to build relationships based on trust.