Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
In this provocative and compelling examination of the deep politics of war, Carolyn Nordstrom takes us from the immediacy of war-zone survival, through the offices of power brokers, to vast extra-legal networks that fuel war and international profiteering. She captures the human face of the front lines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of war in the twenty-first century. Shadows of War is grounded in ethnographic research carried out at the epicenters of political violence on several continents. Its pages are populated not only with the perpetrators and victims of war but also with the scoundrels, silent heroes, and average families who live their lives in the midst of explosive violence. War reconfigures our most basic notions of humanity, Nordstrom demonstrates. This book, of crucial importance at the present moment, shows that war is enmeshed in struggles over the very foundations of the sovereign state, the crafting of economic empires both legal and illegal, and innovative searches for peace.
Read more
Nordstrom describes the multi-trillion-dollar international financial networks that support warfare. She traces the entangled routes by which illegal drugs, precious gems, weapons, basic food supplies, and pharmaceuticals are moved by an international cast of businesspeople, profiteers, and black-market operators. Shadows of War demonstrates how the experiences of both the architects of war and of ordinary people are deleted from media accounts and replaced with stories about soldiers, weapons, and territory. For the first time, this book retrieves from the shadows the faces of those whose stories seldom reach the light of international recognition.
Liked Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary Shares anthropology, nonfiction -
Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa Shares anthropology, nonfiction, Africa -
Violence in War and Peace Shares anthropology, nonfiction, anthro -
The Mountain People Shares anthropology, nonfiction, Africa
“People who read Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century tend to reach for these next.”
-
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda
-
Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia
-
Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope
-
Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States
