Overview

More than twenty years after the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, there has yet to be a meaningful public reckoning with the war. Collateral Damages brings Iraqi stories—which have been systematically excluded from dominant Western narratives of the war—to the fore. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Nadia El-Shaarawi traces Iraqis' experiences of the 2003 invasion and the violence and displacement that followed, from urban exile in Cairo to efforts to rebuild by pursuing third-country resettlement—often in the very country responsible for them becoming refugees. Iraqis' theorizations of war and displacement illuminate how prevailing histories and memories of both the Iraq War and the larger Global War on Terror can be understood as imperial unknowing—epistemological and relational practices by which imperial power produces conditions of ignorance, hubris, obfuscation, and a willful turning away. Iraqis' accounts draw attention to that which empire prefers to keep hidden and offer possibilities for knowing the social and political effects of war differently.

Full Product Details

9780520392120

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Reviews

“Collateral Damages is not a polemic but an act of witness. . . . Clear, courageous, and profoundly humane, it stands as one of the few works that give the Iraq War’s survivors back their voice and their dignity” * Pianeta Libri news *

“Collateral Damages is not a polemic but an act of witness. . . . Clear, courageous, and profoundly humane, it stands as one of the few works that give the Iraq War’s survivors back their voice and their dignity” * Pianeta Libri news * “A compelling and theoretically rich ethnographic study of Iraqi refugees who were displaced to Egypt in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq.” * Developing Economies *

Author Information

Nadia El-Shaarawi is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Colby College.

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