Today we are accustomed to psychiatrists being summoned to scenes of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, war, and other tragic events to care for the psychic trauma of victims--yet it has not always been so. The very idea of psychic trauma came into being only at the end of the nineteenth century and for a long time was treated with suspicion. "The Empire of Trauma" tells the story of how the traumatic victim became culturally and politically respectable, and how trauma itself became an unassailable moral category.

Basing their analysis on a wide-ranging ethnography, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman examine the politics of reparation, testimony, and proof made possible by the recognition of trauma. They study the application of psychiatric victimology to victims of the 1995 terrorist bombings in Paris and the 2001 industrial disaster in Toulouse; the involvement of humanitarian psychiatry with both Palestinians and Israelis during the second Intifada; and the application of the psychotraumatology of exile to asylum seekers victimized by persecution and torture.

Revealing how trauma has come to authenticate the suffering of victims, "The Empire of Trauma" provides critical perspective on some of the moral and political issues at stake in the contemporary world.

Is France afraid of her others? By looking back at the discourses and practices that have been formed over the last fifteen years, Sarah Mazouz addresses French politics of alterity. Drawing on an ethnographic survey conducted in both public administrations in charge of combating racial discrimination and in naturalisation offices in a large city in the Paris region, she shows how immigration, nation, and racialisation are articulated in the social space. Through the analysis of these two public offices, Mazouz questions the processes of inclusion and exclusion within the national group itself and between the national and the foreigner. In so doing, she seeks to grasp the paradoxical relationship between the French Republic and her others and the plural logics producing national order.

Is France afraid of her others? By looking back at the discourses and practices that have been formalised over the last fifteen years, Sarah Mazouz addresses French politics of alterity. Drawing on an ethnographic survey lead in both public administrations in charge of combating racial discrimination and naturalisation offices of a large city in the Paris region, she shows how immigration, nation and racialization are articulated in the social space. Through the analysis of these two public policies, she questions the processes of inclusion and exclusion within the national group itself (through the examination of the modalities taken by anti-discrimination) and outside, between the national and the foreigner (through the study of naturalization practices). In so doing, it seeks to grasp the paradoxical relationship between the Republic and her others and the plural logics producing national order.