Combat Trauma

A bracing, riveting, and vitally important critique of American empire and the ideological mechanisms for normalizing permanent warfare. Few authors have considered the psychosocial and ethical instruments of imperial warfare with such clarity or looked so directly at US culpability in the War on Terror. Every single US taxpayer should read this book. – Joseph Masco, author of The Future of FalloutIn this path-breaking book, Abu El-Haj examines changes in the understanding of combat trauma to demonstrate that psychiatry, operating in tandem with imperial interventions, helps create the political conditions necessary for the reproduction of U.S. militarism. With her finger on the pulse of American political life, she shows how perpetrators become victims, while the primary casualties of American military violence are ignored, dismissed, and forgotten. – Lisa Wedeen, author of Authoritarian Apprehensions

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning and The Genealogical Science: Genetics, the Origins of the Jews, and the Politics of Epistemology.