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Collateral Damages
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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 syst...
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29 April 2025

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.
Price: $29.95
Pages: 256
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: California Series in Public Anthropology
Publication Date:
29 April 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520392137
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
“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.”
Nadia El-Shaarawi is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Colby College.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Departure
1. "Bad History": Imperial Unknowing and the Iraq War
2. War Archive: Telling and Listening to War Stories
3. Living in the Transit City: Seeking Refuge, Refusing Refugeeness
4. Negotiating Humanitarian "Solutions" to Displacement: Iraqis' Experiences of the Refugee Resettlement Process in Cairo
5. Allies and Enemies: Resettlement and the Conditionality of Iraqis' Relations with US Empire
Conclusion: Arrival
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Departure
1. "Bad History": Imperial Unknowing and the Iraq War
2. War Archive: Telling and Listening to War Stories
3. Living in the Transit City: Seeking Refuge, Refusing Refugeeness
4. Negotiating Humanitarian "Solutions" to Displacement: Iraqis' Experiences of the Refugee Resettlement Process in Cairo
5. Allies and Enemies: Resettlement and the Conditionality of Iraqis' Relations with US Empire
Conclusion: Arrival
Notes
References
Index