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Collateral damages: Tracing the debts and displacements of the Iraq War By NadiaEl‐Shaarawi, Oakland: University of California Press. 2025. 239 pp.

Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Nadia El-Shaarawi's Collateral Damage is a timely and powerful ethnography that examines how imperial and humanitarian interventions-namely, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent resettlement of displaced Iraqis-have worked in tandem to erase Iraqi refugees' experiences and aspirations while erasing the impact of imperial violence on Iraqis themselves.Focusing on refugees who fled to Cairo between 2006 and 2008, the book seeks to build an archive of war that centers Iraqi voices by tracing the existential and political precarity, along with the bureaucratic labyrinth, they must navigate for years-sometimes decades-after displacement.To explain why Iraqis' perspectives have been absent or marginalized in media coverage, military analyses, and humanitarian discourse, El-Shaarawi advances the concepts of collateral damage and imperial unknowing.Though formulated in relation to the US invasion of Iraq, these concepts illuminate a broader pattern repeatedly invoked by the US military and humanitarian organizations in other contexts where US interventions have produced mass displacement and pervasive violence.Together, these concepts absolve the US military of responsibility for the harms of invasion by mobilizing a rhetoric of care and ignorance, and obfuscating the entanglement of imperial violence and humanitarianism (16).El-Shaarawi observes that, in military parlance, "collateral damage" frames civilian casualties as a tragic but unavoidable byproduct of military necessity.This framing simultaneously renders civilian deaths and injuries agentless and unintentional while turning a blind eye to the destruction of infrastructure and land essential to civilian life.Although intended to humanize war by military personnel, collateral damage is better understood as "a calculated indifference"-a deliberate and integral feature of contemporary warfare that enables states to claim compliance with international law even as they kill and injure civilians (8).Alongside this, El-Shaarawi introduces the concept of imperial unknowing, a set of imperial practices rooted in hubris, ignorance, and denial that function "to obscure forms of responsibility and relatedness" and are thus central to liberal imperial violence and its disavowal of collateral damage (14).Strikingly, both concepts are mobilized not only by the US military and media but also by humanitarian organizations.Whereas mainstream US discourses by the media and the military often characterize the invasion of Iraq as a "mistake" to be forgotten, humanitarian organizations rely on vulnerability as a criterion for resettlement, rarely interrogating why or how Iraqi refugees were displaced and rendered vulnerable in the first place.By examining the experiences of Iraqi refugees-particularly their displacement from Iraq to Egypt and their efforts
DOI: 10.1111/maq.70036
Author: Zainab Saleh
Institution: Haverford College
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4416138419
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