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The city of Hebron is important to Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions as home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the burial site of three biblical couples: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Today, Hebron is one of the epicenters of the Israel-Palestine conflict, consisting of two unequal populations: a traditional Palestinian majority without citizenship, and a fundamentalist Jewish settler minority with full legal rights. Contemporary Jewish settler practices and sensibilities, legal gray zones, and ruling complicities have remade Hebron into a divided Palestinian city surrounded by a landscape of fragmented, militarized strongholds.In Settling Hebron, Tamara Neuman examines how religion functions as ideology in Hebron, with a focus on Jewish settler expansion and its close but ambivalent relationship to the Israeli state. Neuman presents the first critical ethnography of the Jewish settler populations in Kiryat Arba and the adjacent Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Hebron,considered by many Israelis as the most "ideological" of settlements. Through extensive fieldwork, interviews with settlers, soldiers, displaced Palestinian urban residents and farmers as well as archival research, Neuman challenges dismissive portraits of settlers as rigid, fanatical adherents of an anachronistic worldview. At the same time, she reveals the extent of disconnection between these settler communities and mainstream Modern Orthodox Judaism, both of which interpret written sources on the sacredness of land—biblical texts, rabbinic commentary, and mystical traditions—in radically different ways. Neuman also traces the violent results of a settler formation, Palestinian responses to settler encroachment, and the connection between ideological settlement and economic processes. Settling Hebron explores the complexity of Hebron''s Jewish settler community in its own right—through its routine practices and rituals, its most extreme instances of fundamentalist revision and violence, and its strategic relationships with successive Israeli governments.

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.

In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh and their efforts to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend.

War Is Coming is an ethnographic study that sheds light on the everyday conversations, practices, and experiences of people in Lebanon who live in between moments of political violence, remember past wars, and anticipate future turmoil.

A richly detailed account of the lived experiences of ordinary people in this multicultural city between 1992 and 1996, during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Exploring how civilians coped with desperate circumstances, it argues that ethnonational divisions were the result rather than the cause of the war.

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.

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.

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 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.

Former Guerrillas in Mozambique describes the trajectories of former RENAMO combatants in Mozambique and emphasizes the ways in which they navigate unstable and sometimes dangerous social and political environments during and after a civil war.

States of Dispossession highlights everyday experiences in an attempt to understand the persistent and intangible effects of dispossession and the ways people of differing religious and ethnic backgrounds remember, experience, and live with the remains of a violence that is still unfolding.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rebel camp located deep in the Congo forest, Anna Hedlund explores the micropolitics and practices of everyday life in a community of Hutu rebel fighters and their families and attempts to understand why they continue to fight in what appears to be an endless conflict.

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.

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.

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

The first work to focus specifically on the anthropology of state terror.

Fiona Wright traces the ethics and politics of radical Jewish Israeli leftwing activists who challenge the violence perpetrated by their state and in their name. She imparts the ways in which activists constantly negotiate their own condition of complicity and the impossibility of reconciling their principles with their everyday lives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conscientious Objectors in Israel chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish Israeli conscientious objectors as they grapple with their consciences under the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.