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 2014-2015 and 2021-2024, 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 isand what resistance looks like. By asking what actions and dispositions make sense when conditions of survival are diminished, and today may be better than tomorrow, Rubaii offers new methods and insights to those concerned about the possibilities of life amidst environmental devastation, mass displacement, and the slow violence of the forever wars.
