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.
Nadia El-Shaarawi is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Colby College.
"Heartbreaking accounts of Iraqis living through imperial violence and forced migration are set in the context of a deeply original framing of both war and humanitarianism. As these metastasizing features of contemporary life are still invisible to or ignored by the citizens of the United States, Nadia El-Shaarawi's book is a brilliant and ever more necessary read."—Catherine Lutz, Department of Anthropology, and cofounder, Costs of War project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
"This beautifully written book starts with an irony that has been rendered unknowable: the United States resettles and offers humanitarian aid to those displaced by its own imperial violence. This is conveyed as generosity rather than as a debt to those who have been displaced. El-Shaarawi's deeply insightful, nuanced ethnography of Iraqi refugees waiting for resettlement expands both temporal and epistemological frames to show the connections between the war on Iraq and humanitarianism—a tying together that renders visible US complicity and responsibility. A must-read from a leading scholar of the turn to temporality in migration studies."—Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP), CUNY Graduate Center
"Collateral Damages is a beautifully crafted ethnography that is exceptional in its breadth of scholarly insight. It depicts with great care the prismatic complexity of temporal experience and the psychic investment structuring Iraqi migrant experiences in Egypt. As Iraqis wait indefinitely for resettlement, life projects are suspended. El-Sharaawi's exploration of this experience of existential suspension represents a timely and important contribution to the study of displacement.
El-Shaarawi's central structuring concept of imperial unknowing is both brilliant and persuasive. It's an intrinsically interesting move to think about the way unknowing has been mobilized as a form of power and privilege in the context of US imperial politics, and to examine what crests into view when one attends to the largely unexamined alignment of power and 'ignorance.' Collateral Damages will secure El-Sharaawi's reputation as a leading scholar of the Iraqi refugee experience and the affective afterlives of empire that have arisen through the intertwinement of US-led military and humanitarian intervention in the Middle East. The judiciousness and fineness of sensibility she shows throughout is in fact a precondition of serious ethnographic work on Iraqi refugees, whose material and aspirational lives have tended to be flattened into moral counters in a political and rhetorical game."—Diana Allan, Associate Professor, and Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Living Archives, McGill University
"This is a book I was waiting for without knowing it. A research-based work that reveals the intersection of imperial warfare, mass displacement, and humanitarianism. Centered around the concept of imperial unknowing, Collateral Damages exposes how epistemological practices are weaponized to obscure the imperial construction of the distorted relationship between barbarism and civilization. A valuable contribution to academia and beyond."—Shahram Khosravi, Professor, Stockholm University
256 pp.6 x 9
9780520392120$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Apr 2025