Resurgency
Outlasting the War on Terror in Iraq

Kali Rubaii (Author)

9781478033813

Hardback, published 31 July 2026

318 pages, 36 illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.599 kg

"This powerful, harrowing, beautiful ethnography might be one of the most consequential scholarly books written this year, even this decade. As one of Rubaii’s Iraqi interlocutors tell us at the outset: 'Don’t be naÏve: we are your future.' This book is both a faithful tribune for a people subjected to punishing forever wars initiated by the US, and an admonition about a bleak future that awaits us all, unless we move, now."—Laleh Khalili, author of Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Shape the Global Economy

“Resurgency tells a story that cries out to be heard. Rubaii’s warm and engaging narrative voice alongside her eye for horrifying and humanizing details make this not only a courageous ethnography and an important contribution to anthropological theory, but also a vital offering to public culture and democratic debate. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Middle East.”—Hugh Gusterson co-editor of Militarization: A Reader

“A remarkable ethnography. Kali Rubaii sheds light on the protracted impacts of war and occupation on the peoples, livelihoods, landscapes, and plants and other non-human species in Iraq—and, by implication, the world over. This important, timely, and richly evocative book offers distinctive concepts and framings that will surely be adopted by other anthropologists writing about genocide, ecocide, and corporate plunder.”—Nathalie Peutz, New York University-Abu Dhabi

"Resurgency, by Iraqi-American anthropologist Kali Rubaii, is one of the best books I've read about Middle East politics in the last few years. . . . This stunningly original, deeply researched, and fiercely critical book should be widely read not only by anthropologists or by Iraq specialists but by everyone thinking about war, American foreign policy, or the Global South."—Marc Lynch, The Ghost of Abu Aardvark

"Few studies have captured in such depth the ways Anbaris’ react, respond and heal from 'war-induced social and ecological collapse.' . . . Rubaii’s engaging storytelling — animated by the book’s dramatis personae — gives it an edge not always found in academia."—Nazli Tarzi, Canary

Resurgency examines how Iraqi farmers outlast the long shadow of US military intervention as they return to repair their war-damaged homeland. Based on detailed ethnographic research, Kali Rubaii expands the temporal and descriptive definitions of war, displacement, and resistance.

In Resurgency, Kali Rubaii offers detailed ethnographic insight into how decades of war have affected everyday life in Iraq. Drawing on fieldwork in Anbar province and Iraqi Kurdistan in 2014–15 and 2021–24, Rubaii foregrounds the practices of displaced people who stubbornly outlast their occupiers, returning to homes that feel estranging, repairing war-damaged land, and surviving into futures to which they have been disinvited. Following Anbari farmers in their struggle to counter the social and environmental fallout from toxic military waste, depleted ecosystems, and transformed political economies, Resurgency expands the temporal and descriptive categories of what war is—and what resistance looks like. By asking what actions and dispositions make sense when conditions of survival are diminished, and when today may be better than tomorrow, Rubaii offers new methods and insights to those concerned about the possibilities of life amid environmental devastation, mass displacement, and the slow violence of the forever wars.

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Transhumance 1
Part I
1. Things Worse Than Death 43
[War Game: Target] 67
2. Divide and Rule 69
[War Game: Cut the Herd] 99
3. Suspense 104
[War Game: Suspend Death] 130
Part II
4. Dryness 137
[War Game: Reconstruct] 166
5. Germicide 170
[War Game: Abstract] 197
6. Abstraction 201
Conclusion: Disfiguring Hope 239
Notes 247
Works Cited 267
Index 291