Resurgency: Outlasting the War on Terror in Iraq

Book Talk: Resurgency: Outlasting the War on Terror in Iraq

Dr. Kali Rubaii, Department of Anthropology, Purdue University

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 2014–15 and 2021–24, 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 when today may be better than tomorrow, Rubaii offers new methods and insights to those concerned about the possibilities of life amid environmental devastation, mass displacement, and the slow violence of the forever wars.