Full Description
In Resurgency, Kali Rubaii offers detailed ethnographic insight into how decades of war have affected everyday life in Iraq. Drawing on fieldwork in Anbar province and Iraqi Kurdistan in 2014-2015 and 2021-2024, Rubaii foregrounds the practices of displaced people who stubbornly outlast their occupiers, returning to homes that feel estranging, repairing war-damaged land, and surviving into futures to which they have been disinvited. Following Anbari farmers in their struggle to counter the social and environmental fallout from toxic military waste, depleted ecosystems, and transformed political economies, Resurgency expands the temporal and descriptive categories of what war is—and what resistance looks like. By asking what actions and dispositions make sense when conditions of survival are diminished, and today may be better than tomorrow, Rubaii offers new methods and insights to those concerned about the possibilities of life amidst environmental devastation, mass displacement, and the slow violence of the forever wars.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Transhumance 1
Part I
1. Things Worse Than Death 43
[War Game: Target] 67
2. Divide and Rule 69
[War Game: Cut the Herd] 99
3. Suspense 104
[War Game: Suspend Death] 130
Part II
4. Dryness 137
[War Game: Reconstruct] 166
5. Germicide 170
[War Game: Abstract] 197
6. Abstraction 201
Conclusion: Disfiguring Hope 239
Notes 247
Works Cited 267
Index 291
