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A study of Timorese communities that offers a human perspective on post-conflict reconciliation.

Violent conflict may end in a kind of peace. But reconciliation processes do not always work, let alone bring healing. How are families and communities to rebuild their lives when old divisions, pain, and memories still linger? Centering on social repair, this beautifully crafted study explores how families and communities in Timor-Leste and exile communities in Indonesia live with the enduring consequences of political violence, forced separation, and displacement after twenty-four years of Indonesian occupation.

Following relationships across borders and between generations, Boundaries of Repair shows how ruptures in kinship and community life reverberate across time and space, and even between the living and the dead. Rather than treating repair as a state-driven undertaking, the book reveals social repair as an uneven, fragile, and ongoing process, sustained through everyday care practices, memory work, emotional labor, and creative acts of negotiation in contexts marked by impunity and unresolved loss.

By foregrounding what it means to live with damage that cannot be fully repaired, the book challenges dominant assumptions about justice, healing, and closure. It offers a powerful account of how people renegotiate relationships, boundaries, and belonging amid traces of violence, contributing new insights to debates on post-conflict recovery, memory, displacement, and the limits of reconciliation.

The South American nation of Colombia has experienced decades of violence involving state, guerrilla, and paramilitary actors, resulting in profound and enduring consequences. Scholars have examined both the violent events and the subsequent truth and reconciliation initiatives addressing this complex history. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá introduces a novel perspective by integrating Black, Indigenous, and memory studies in her analysis of two significant sites of mass violence: Bahia Portete, a Wayuu Indigenous territory in Upper Guajira, and Bojayá, a Black and Embera Indigenous territory in Chocó. By recognizing nonhuman and nonliving community members as actants and foregrounding Indigenous and Black ontologies in collective remembrance, Riaño-Alcalá reveals the processes through which these communities engage in social repair. She demonstrates how they interpret, restore, sustain, and reimagine their identities amid ongoing challenges posed by war and racial capitalism. This work advances scholarship in human rights studies, memory studies, Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, and the anthropology of social repair, offering significant new insights into a well-examined historical context.

Captures the tenuous reality of daily life for those in and outside Burma.

In the wake of the military coup of February 2021, a new and unsettling reality has emerged in Burma. Unlike previous uprisings, this time the junta's reach extends beyond marginalized groups and ethnic territories to target the entire spectrum of civil society—urban and rural, young and old, across all groups, faiths, and social classes. The "Spring Revolution" sees Generation Z not only resisting authoritarian rule but also striving to forge a new societal vision.

In the face of totalitarian desocialization, a complex dance of dislocation and repair unfolds, within, outside, and along Burma's international borders. Survival takes a multi-sited approach to explore these dynamics: we hear from asylum seekers in France, the undocumented in Thailand, resistance leaders in constant motion, and, through the medium of the handphone, from within Burma. The result that emerges is a compelling picture of the individual struggle in an unforgiving situation, of interest to anyone who seeks a grounded understanding of the conflict—and what might emerge from it. Highly engaged yet academically rigorous, this compelling book also opens new spaces for understanding the complications of migration in today’s world.

A stirring exploration of abolitionist thought and Black feminism to articulate a transformative theory of repair

Amid the relentless news of ICE raids, Supreme Court rulings that dismantle our civil rights, and egregious violations of democratic norms, people in the United States are struggling to visualize an actionable path forward. In To Turn the World Around, Ali Aslam proposes a transformative approach that pairs inner healing work with collective external engagement challenging oppressive forces. To actualize W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of abolition democracy, drawing from Black sociality grounded in the refusal of white institutions, Aslam advocates for not working within a broken system nor fleeing it, or merely enduring injustice, and instead offers combined personal healing and embodied action.

Aslam’s vision of transformative selfhood centers healing justice, self and mutual aid, and a somatic approach informed by Black women’s history of navigating bodily dispossession and violations of autonomy and personhood. Simultaneously a tool of personal survival, political refusal, and collective care, inner work incubates new forms of resistance and prepares participants to engage with the outer work of abolition. The movements that rise from the foundation of this inner work are collaborative and experimental, a collective “figuring out” that creates holistic approaches to abolition that transcend conventional politics.

Reimagining inner work as resistance that is ongoing, expansive, and relational, To Turn the World Around offers a stirring framework for the creation of transformational movements. Aslam’s unique theory of repair carefully bridges constituencies, acknowledging the politics of refusal while embracing the hopefulness of sociality.

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