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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.

A Different Kind of War Story takes us to the frontlines of one of the most brutal wars in recent history. The setting is Mozambique during the fifteen-year war of terror that took a million lives - mostly civilian - and completely destroyed homes, crops, hospitals, schools, and even access to water. Carolyn Nordstrom tells, often in their own words, what Mozambicans experienced and how many not only endured but responded creatively to brutality and unrelenting terror. She shows us how, drawing on a rich repertoire of cultural traditions, Mozambican civilians dealt with devastating violence without perpetuating it and, through their courage and creativity, made the restoration of peace possible. She compares the conflict in Mozambique with similar conflicts and offers a new way of looking at political violence, showing that just as violence is learned, it can be unlearned.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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