Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (review)

Countless dispatches, novels and memoirs reveal the personal experience of war to be deeply chaotic. And yet the political analysis of war remains deceptively clear, describing struggles between states and defined interests, all neatly ordered through statistics and maps. In an ambitious and provocative work, Carolyn Nordstrom sets out to bridge this divide by tracking warfare ethnographically on the ground. Following conflict across places like Mozambique, Sri Lanka, and Angola, she finds not only the small stories of splintered lives, but also an elusive, uncharted landscape of connections they share in common. Nordstrom further suggests that much of what actually transpires in contemporary war zones happens in what she calls the "shadows"—a zone beginning at the edge of official state order and extending into the heart of legal darkness. Our accounts of international events, centered on formal campaigns, policy initiatives, economic sectors, aid organizations, and the like, are at best incomplete. Neither war nor peace registers fully in public records.

The book contains five parts, further divided into seventeen chapters, all arranged to sequentially explore themes of war, extra-state activities, and problems of peace. In addition, there is a short postscript addressing Iraq. Throughout, the author interweaves anecdotes, quotations from her interlocutors, analysis, and photographs of people and artifacts found in war zones. The overall assemblage is richly detailed, open-ended, and hardly linear in the conventional sense of academic argument. Yet it is also fully engaging and surprisingly easy to read, all the more so since the work's structure lends itself to intermittent engagements and allows for easy re-entry. Thus Shadows of War is the rare sort of academic text that does lend itself to actual teaching, not to mention engagements with a wider audience who care less about specific debates in literature than about having an inkling of what might actually be going on in the world. I recently included excerpts of it in a large undergraduate course, and was impressed by the number of students who found it revelatory.

Nordstrom begins the introductory section by noting that "war" is an impossible word, encompassing widely varying forms of human experience. Moreover, she suggests, extra-state activities remain invisible when the focus remains on political conflict. Social science is methodologically hamstrung when it comes to accounting for activities that happen between places among actors who take up multiple roles. Her solution is to emphasize ethnography, the anthropological tradition of direct, experiential investigation. But hers is an undisciplined, opportunistic form of scholarship, one that can "follow the question" without stopping at either geographic or conceptual borders. At the same time she stresses the need to protect sources, and allow some silences to remain. Only through such an approach, she suggests, and the acceptance of the partial, incomplete knowledge it can provide, can we begin to glimpse the range of extra-state activities related to warfare.

Nordstrom then recounts a conversation between several iconic inhabitants of war zones: a doctor, a journalist, a merchant and an nongovernmental (NGO) staffer. Knowing and war-weary, they sketch the landscape of their existence. They have every reason and opportunity to leave it, and yet nonetheless continue to remain on the job out of a larger loyalty to community. Why, Nordstrom wonders through the following chapter, does much of the content of such war conversations leach out of larger accounts of war? Why do accounts of events like riots ignore specific stories in favor of generalized images of violation? She suggests there are a number of uncomfortable truths that quietly vanish amid conventional narrations: that in contemporary warfare most casualties are civilian; that victims of war often suffer at the hands of military actors; that no matter who shoots or wins, certain elites profit from the opportunities that conflict brings. As well, we cling to neat moral divisions between legal and clandestine worlds, ignoring any evidence that they might readily...