Resurgency examines how Iraqi farmers outlast the long shadow of US military intervention as they return to repair their war-damaged homeland. Based on detailed ethnographic research, Kali Rubaii expands the temporal and descriptive definitions of war, displacement, and resistance.

In Resurgency, Kali Rubaii offers detailed insight into how decades of war have affected everyday life in Iraq. Drawing on fieldwork in Anbar province and Iraqi Kurdistan in 2014–15 and 2021–24, 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 categories of what war is—and what resistance looks like. By asking what actions make sense when conditions of survival are diminished, and when today may be better than tomorrow, Rubaii offers new insights to those concerned about the possibilities of life amid environmental devastation, mass displacement, and the slow violence of the forever wars.

**We ask that all in-person attendees wear masks in the event space during the program for the health and well-being of the speaker and other guests. We will have a reception afterwards with light refreshments and books available for purchase.**

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Speakers:

Kali Rubaii is a cultural anthropologist at Purdue University whose scholarship focuses on displacement, health justice, and the environmental impacts of war and its chains of supply. She leads the Parts Per Million Project on environment and health justice and co-leads the War and Geos project on military supply chains. She is the author of Resurgency: Outlasting the War on Terror in Iraq and co-editor of The Social Properties of Concrete.

Juan González is the co-founder and co-host of Democracy Now! since 1996. He was a staff columnist for New York’s Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He is the author of Harvest of Empire, News for All the People, Fallout , and Reclaiming Gotham.

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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Women and Children First. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.