In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that "America" is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans. Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.

In the continuing estrangement between the West and the Muslim Middle East, human rights are becoming increasingly enmeshed with territorial concerns. Marked by both substance and rhetoric, they are situated at the heart of many foreign policy decisions and doctrines of social change, and often serve as a justification for aggressive actions. In humanitarian and political debates about the topic, women and children are frequently considered first. Since the 1990s, human rights have become the most legitimate and legitimizing juridicial and cultural claim made on a woman's behalf. But what are the consequences of equating women's rights with human rights? As the eleven essays in this volume show, the impact is often contradictory. Bringing together some of the most respected scholars in the field, including Inderpal Grewal, Leela Fernandes, Leigh Gilmore, Susan Koshy, Patrice McDermott, and Sidonie Smith, Just Advocacy? sheds light on the often overlooked ways that women and children are further subjugated when political or humanitarian groups represent them solely as victims and portray the individuals that are helping them as paternal saviors. Drawn from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, Just Advocacy? promises to advance a more nuanced and politically responsible understanding of human rights both for scholars and activists. Wendy S. Hesford is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Wendy Kozol is an associate professor of gender and women's studies at Oberlin College.

In our wired world, visual images of military conflict and political strife are ubiquitous. Far less obvious, far more elusive, is "how" we see such images, how witnessing military violence and suffering affects us. "Distant Wars Visible" brings a new perspective to such enduring questions about conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy, whether in support of U.S. military objectives or in critique of the nation at war.

At the book's center is what author Wendy Kozol calls an analytic of ambivalence--a critical approach to the tensions between spectacle and empathy provoked by gazing at military atrocities and trauma. Through this approach, "Distant Wars Visible" uses key concepts such as the politics of recoil, the notion of looking elsewhere, skeptical documents, and ethical spectatorship to examine multiple visual cultural practices depicting war, on and off the battlefield, from the 1999 NATO bombings in Kosovo to the present.

Kozol's analysis draws from collections of family photographs, human rights photography, independent film production, photojournalism, and other examples of war's visual culture, as well as extensive visual evidence of the ways in which U.S. militarism operates to maintain geopolitical dominance--from Fallujah and Abu Ghraib to the most recent drone strikes in Pakistan.

Throughout, Kozol reveals how factors such as gender, race, and sexuality construct competing visualizations of identity in a range of media from graphic narrative and film to conflict photography and battlefield souvenirs--and how contingencies and contradictions in visual culture shape the politics and ethics of witnessing.