Historians consider the previous century to have been one of the most violent periods in human history. As we move into an era where violence is sanitized and normalized in the media, and depicted as glamorous and fun, how will we relate to the violence in our midst? Why do people and their governments choose to engage in violent activity? How to peaceful people who live under violent conditions such as warfare or domestic abuse make sense of it?

Catherine Besteman tackles these questions in this multi-disciplinary anthology that explores the topic of violence from a wide variety of perspectives. The first section focuses on state violence and deals with nationalism, warmaking and the Nazi genocide. The second section treats the question of anti-state violence with essays on the IRA, Sihk rebels and the paramilitary conflict in the Balkans. The third section examines criminal violence such as armed robbery, murder and sexual assualt while the final section explores how ordinary citizens respond when their societies are suffused with violence. Combining classic essays by Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, with contemporary treatments by leading scholars such as Michael Taussig and Julie Peteet, this anthology is designed for course use and is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students.

Contributors: Max Weber, Charles Tilly, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Martha Crenshaw, Deborah Poole, Cynthia Mahmood, Begonia Aretxaga, Rhonda Copelon, Jack Katz, Deborah Cameron, Elizabeth Fraser, Michael Taussig, Julie Peteet, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Carolyn Nordstrom.

In Militarized Global Apartheid Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global north are reproducing South Africa's apartheid system on a worldwide scale to control the mobility and labor of people from the global south. Exploring the different manifestations of global apartheid, Besteman traces how militarization and securitization reconfigure older forms of white supremacy and deploy them in new contexts to maintain this racialized global order. Whether using the language of security, military intervention, surveillance technologies, or detention centers and other forms of incarceration, these projects reinforce and consolidate the global north's political and economic interests at the expense of the poor, migrants, refugees, Indigenous populations, and people of color. By drawing out how this new form of apartheid functions and pointing to areas of resistance, Besteman opens up new space to theorize potential sources of liberatory politics.

In Militarized Global Apartheid Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global north are reproducing South Africa's apartheid system on a worldwide scale to control the mobility and labor of people from the global south. Exploring the different manifestations of global apartheid, Besteman traces how militarization and securitization reconfigure older forms of white supremacy and deploy them in new contexts to maintain this racialized global order. Whether using the language of security, military intervention, surveillance technologies, or detention centers and other forms of incarceration, these projects reinforce and consolidate the global north's political and economic interests at the expense of the poor, migrants, refugees, Indigenous populations, and people of color. By drawing out how this new form of apartheid functions and pointing to areas of resistance, Besteman opens up new space to theorize potential sources of liberatory politics.

The essays in this book address the inter-relationship of power, politics, and violence, examining why the political process of managing power within states sometimes becomes physically violent. This volume brings together some of the classic writings on the relationship between states and violence within some of the best new work on political violence in local settings. The essays address state-backed violence against citizens and subjects, and violence by citizens against the state and between citizens for control of the state.

Historians consider the previous century to have been one of the most violent periods in human history. As we move into an era where violence is sanitized and normalized in the media, and depicted as glamorous and fun, how will we relate to the violence in our midst? Why do people and their governments choose to engage in violent activity? How to peaceful people who live under violent conditions such as warfare or domestic abuse make sense of it?

Catherine Besteman tackles these questions in this multi-disciplinary anthology that explores the topic of violence from a wide variety of perspectives. The first section focuses on state violence and deals with nationalism, warmaking and the Nazi genocide. The second section treats the question of anti-state violence with essays on the IRA, Sihk rebels and the paramilitary conflict in the Balkans. The third section examines criminal violence such as armed robbery, murder and sexual assualt while the final section explores how ordinary citizens respond when their societies are suffused with violence. Combining classic essays by Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, with contemporary treatments by leading scholars such as Michael Taussig and Julie Peteet, this anthology is designed for course use and is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students.

Contributors: Max Weber, Charles Tilly, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Martha Crenshaw, Deborah Poole, Cynthia Mahmood, Begonia Aretxaga, Rhonda Copelon, Jack Katz, Deborah Cameron, Elizabeth Fraser, Michael Taussig, Julie Peteet, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Carolyn Nordstrom.

How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives in a new country when their world has totally changed? In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their homes in Somalia before the onset in 1991 of Somalia's civil war, to their displacement to Kenyan refugee camps, to their relocation in cities across the United States, to their settlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine. Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman's account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.

How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives in a new country when their world has totally changed? In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their homes in Somalia before the onset in 1991 of Somalia's civil war, to their displacement to Kenyan refugee camps, to their relocation in cities across the United States, to their settlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine. Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman's account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.

Unraveling Somalia Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery Catherine Besteman "Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."--"Choice" In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees. During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare between various clans and subclans. In "Unraveling Somalia," Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence--inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners--contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation-state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization--a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region, and language. Catherine Besteman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. The Ethnography of Political Violence 1999 296 pages 6 x 9 11 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-1688-2 Paper $27.50s 18.00 World Rights Anthropology, History, African-American/African Studies Short copy: "Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."--"Choice"

Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, "The Insecure American" demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits. This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world. Available: November 2004 Pub Date: January 2005

"An engaging, insightful and at times beautifully written account of post-apartheid transformation in the city of Cape Town. Besteman shows the continuing legacy of apartheid, racial segregation and poverty in South Africa as well as glimpses of new forms of cultural creativity and identity formation that are characterized by empathy, compassion, and hope. "Transforming Cape Town" deserves to be read by anthropologists and anyone interested in how people confront the challenges of racial exclusion and historical inequality, and how a few bold agents of transformation seek to create new social spaces to cross old barriers."--Richard A. Wilson, author of "The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa"
"Cape Town and anthropology come alive in Besteman's work. Insightful, dynamic, and well-written, this book opens a 'space of trust' to understanding the pains and creative innovations of transition--of people, politics, and daily survival--in a new light."--Carolyn Nordstrom, author of "Global Outlaws and Shadows of War"
"Besteman navigates and illuminates post-apartheid Cape Town with uncommon skill. She brings to bear an anthropologist's training, a reporter's eye and ear for the choice remark, the telling detail and a candid sympathy for the disenfranchised, whose lot in South Africa has not necessarily improved under democracy. It's a distressing picture she draws: the persisting mutual ignorance, even reciprocal demonization, across old ethnic and racial lines, alongside the ongoing economic injustice. The revolution in South Africa has been a piecemeal affair, and Besteman's descriptions of the difficulties that even the best-intentioned individuals encounter asthey struggle toward creating a general social transformation ring painfully true."--William Finnegan, author of "Crossing the Line," "Dateline Soweto," "A Complicated War," and "Cold New World"
""Transforming Cape Town" is a fascinating account of how people in this divided city engage with democracy, transformation, and the legacies and ongoing realities of radical inequalities. Through conversations with ordinary people, Besteman explores the ways in which apartheid's legacies continue to shape interactions both intimate and public. In doing so, she restores a sense of faith in anthropology as a tool for understanding and critiquing social worlds."--Fiona Ross, author of "Bearing Witness: Women and Truth and Reconciliation"

Computerized processes are everywhere in our society. They are the automated phone messaging systems that businesses use to screen calls; the link between student standardized test scores and public schools' access to resources; the algorithms that regulate patient diagnoses and reimbursements to doctors. The storage, sorting, and analysis of massive amounts of information have enabled the automation of decision-making at an unprecedented level. Meanwhile, computers have offered a model of cognition that increasingly shapes our approach to the world. The proliferation of "roboprocesses" is the result, as editors Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson observe in this rich and wide-ranging volume, which features contributions from a distinguished cast of scholars in anthropology, communications, international studies, and political science. Although automatic processes are designed to be engines of rational systems, the stories in Life by Algorithms reveal how they can in fact produce absurd, inflexible, or even dangerous outcomes. Joining the call for "algorithmic transparency," the contributors bring exceptional sensitivity to everyday sociality into their critique to better understand how the perils of modern technology affect finance, medicine, education, housing, the workplace, food production, public space, and emotions--not as separate problems but as linked manifestations of a deeper defect in the fundamental ordering of our society.

This one-stop guide to getting published in anthropology gives graduate students and young professionals the crucial information and tools they need to tackle the all-important requirement to publish. Part I provides step-by-step guidance on key efforts that budding anthropologists can benefit from, including organizing a conference panel, creating a poster, presenting a paper, getting an article published in a journal, and publishing a dissertation as a monograph. In Part II, scholars in the anthropology subdisciplines offer first-hand insight into publishing in their area. Part III chapters cover author contracts, copyright issues, collaboration, and online publishing opportunities. Helpful appendices list anthropology journals and publishers specializing in anthropology books.