BiblioVault - Books about War victims

Broken Lives and Other Stories

Ris Af#79

Anthonia C. Kalu

Ohio University Press, 2003

In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself. Broken Lives and Other Stories presents a portrait of the ordinary women, children, and men whose lives have been battered by war in their homeland. Written in response to the Nigerian Civil War, known on the Igbo side as Ogu Biafra—the Biafran War—this collection focuses on the everyday conditions of the local people and how their personal situations became entangled in national crises. The stories capture a diversity of issues, from the implications of self-rule and the presence of soldiers among civilians, to masquerades, air raids, and rape. Through her riveting narratives, Kalu draws the reader into the depths of some of Africa’s most troubling issues, such as the concern for safety during the frequent outbreaks of hostilities, which can range from civil unrest to armed combat. How do young people, women, and the elderly cope during those crises? Are the struggles for national political power greater than the everyday struggle for decent living by the person on the street? While conveying the vitality and joy of Africa’s women and youth, Broken Lives and Other Stories also examines the impact of the brain drain caused by wars and instability within the continent itself. Both the war against women and women’s constant war to survive in contemporary Africa are brought into sharp focus throughout these stories. For readers interested in the last thirty-five years of unrest across Africa, this collection is essential reading.

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Innocence and Victimhood

Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

Elissa Helms

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society.

Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years, Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women’s activists and NGOs responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilizing the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasize innocence and victimhood.

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Living with Agent Orange

Conversations in Postwar Viet Nam

Diane Niblack Fox

University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

For over half a century, the Vietnamese people have endured the harmful legacies of Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide used by the American military as a type of chemical warfare. While scientists and politicians continue to debate how to best address its human and environmental consequences, the nearly three million Vietnamese whose lives have been shaped by its lingering effects have been largely left out of the conversation.

To understand how Agent Orange has impacted the lives and livelihoods of everyday Vietnamese people, Diane Niblack Fox interviewed families and individuals living with its aftereffects across the northern, central, and southern regions of the country. In powerfully written prose, Fox shares the personal accounts of villagers, as they describe caring for loved ones with chronic illnesses and disabilities and their attempts to secure medical and financial assistance. Living with Agent Orange also chronicles the moving stories of rebuilt lives, of family and community support, and of the overriding power of the human spirit.

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The Lost Children

Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II

Tara Zahra

Harvard University Press, 2015

During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself.

Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe.

Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.

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The Occupied Clinic

Militarism and Care in Kashmir

Saiba Varma

Duke University Press, 2020

In The Occupied Clinic, Saiba Varma explores the psychological, ontological, and political entanglements between medicine and violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir—the world's most densely militarized place. Into a long history of occupations, insurgencies, suppressions, natural disasters, and a crisis of public health infrastructure come interventions in human distress, especially those of doctors and humanitarians, who struggle against an epidemic: more than sixty percent of the civilian population suffers from depression, anxiety, PTSD, or acute stress. Drawing on encounters between medical providers and patients in an array of settings, Varma reveals how colonization is embodied and how overlapping state practices of care and violence create disorienting worlds for doctors and patients alike. Varma shows how occupation creates worlds of disrupted meaning in which clinical life is connected to political disorder, subverting biomedical neutrality, ethics, and processes of care in profound ways. By highlighting the imbrications between humanitarianism and militarism and between care and violence, Varma theorizes care not as a redemptive practice, but as a fraught sphere of action that is never quite what it seems.

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The Prosecutor and the Judge

Benjamin Ferencz and Antonio Cassese, Interviews and Writings

Heikelina Verrijn Stuart and Marlise Simons

Amsterdam University Press, 2009

The prestigious Praemium Erasmianum 2009 was awarded to Benjamin Ferencz and Antonio Cassese, who embody the history of international criminal law from Nuremberg to The Hague. The Prosecutor and the Judge is a meeting with these two remarkable men through in depth interviews by Heikelina Verrijn Stuart and Marlise Simons about their work and ideas, about the war crimes trials, human cruelty, the self-interest of states; about remorse in the courtroom, about restitution and compensation for victims and about the strength and the limitations of the international courts.

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What Wars Leave Behind

The Faceless and the Forgotten

J. Malcolm Garcia

University of Missouri Press, 2014

They bear labels instead of names—noncombatant, unintended victim, collateral damage. Theirs are the blurred faces and forms seen in news footage shot from a moving vehicle. And when soldiers, media, and profiteers move on to the next conflict, they stay behind to cope amid the wreckage. They have stories to tell to anyone who will pause long enough to hear them.

In What Wars Leave Behind, J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.

Garcia describes his travels in some of the world’s hotspots in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In a series of personal travel essays that read like short stories, he exposes the endless messiness of war and the failings of good intentions, and he traces their impact on the lives of natives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Kosovo, Chad, and Syria. He discovers amazing resilience among people who must struggle just to survive each day.

Garcia gives readers the sort of gritty detail learned from immersing himself in other cultures. He eats the food, drinks the tea, and endures the oppressive heat. These are the stories of how a middle-class guy from the Midwest with a social work degree learned to experience and embrace the cultures of Third World countries in conflict—and lived to tell the tale.

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Wounds of War

Julie M. Lamb, Marcy Levy, and Michael R. Reich

Harvard University Press, 2004

In the last half century, the nature of war has changed dramatically. Wars in the post–Cold War period have occurred mainly within national borders rather than between sovereign states. In these conflicts, civilians are increasingly the deliberate targets of war rather than accidental victims. Women and children in particular have become the intentional targets of murder, rape, and kidnapping.

The book focuses on the impact of war on women and girls, and the potential for women as peacemakers. The text addresses major policy issues facing organizations involved in humanitarian assistance, and highlights actions to address and resolve armed violence and conflict.

Wounds of War presents ten country profiles, along with information on eleven key topics related to the impacts of war, including the economies of war, small arms and light weapons, landmines, violence against women and girls, and missing persons.

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