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TITLE: No Peace, No War An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts
AUTHOR: Paul Richards 
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FORMAT: Hardback (pp: 288) mm
ISBN: 0-85255-936-4
13 digit ISBN: 9780852559369
PUB DATE: 10 Dec 2004
AVAILABILITY: In print
PRICE: �45.00

DESCRIPTION:
The proliferation of 'new wars' since the end of the Cold War has forced scholars to re-open the debate about 'what is war?' For most commentators, 'new war' is 'mindless' mass action. It has become a behavioural problem. Like a disease, the risk of infection must be contained. This book takes a different approach. Anthropologists who have lived with and through the wars they describe here reflect a paradoxical assumption that to understand war we must deny it a special status. Rather than quarantine war and leave it to security specialists they attempt to grasp its character as but one among many phases or aspects of social reality, organised by social agents, made through social action. All war is long-term struggle organised for political ends, and neither the means nor the ends can be understood without reference to a specific social context.

 

CONTENTS:
Obituary of Bernhard Helander by Ioan Lewis & Hugh Beach - New war
- an ethnographic approach by Paul Richards - Political Violence in Cambodia & the Khmer Rouge 'genocide' by Jan Ovesen - Dealing with dilemmas
- violent farmer-pastoralist conflicts in Burkina Faso by Sten Hagberg - Sarajevan soldier story
- perceptions of war & morality by Ivana Macek - Silence & the politics of representing rebellion
- on the emergence of the neutral Maya in Guatemala by Staffan Lofving - 'For God & my life'
- war and cosmology in northern Uganda by Sverker Finnstrom - Making war, crafting peace
- militia solidarities & demobilisation in Sierra Leone by Caspar Fithen & Paul Richards - Building the future
- The reintegration and marginalisation of ex-combatant youth in Liberia by Mats Utas - Memories of violence
- recreation of ethnicity in post-colonial Zimbabwe by Bjorn Lindgren - Belonging in nowhere land
- the Tibetan diaspora as conflict by Asa Tiljander Dahlstrom - Who needs a state?
- Civilians, security & social services in Somalia by Bernhard Helander - Bernhard Helander's bibliography by Michael Barrett


SUBJECT LINK:
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Armed conflict
Anthropology
Violence in society