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Hostage Spaces of the Contemporary Islamicate World

Phantom Territoriality

Dr Dejan Lukic author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:21st Nov '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Hostage Spaces of the Contemporary Islamicate World cover

Gripping exposé of the act of hostage-taking, and of being a hostage, in the spheres of war and terrorism in post-communist geographies of global Islam.

How is hostage space constructed? In this age-long procedure found in conflicts around the world, strange forms of terror and intimacy arise, particularly in the contemporary Islamic cultures of Chechnya, Albania, and Bosnia. This book investigates the modes of desire and politics found in kidnapping, in order to reveal the voices of victims and kidnappers that often remain closed up. Dejan Lukic explores the spaces where hostages and hostage takers come into contact - spaces of accident, sacrifice, hope, and catastrophe - or, in other words, the spaces that announce utopias bound to fail. In this book, the figures of the victim, the terrorist, the sovereign, the resistance fighter and the witness – among others – emerge with a new face; one that will contribute to our understandings of what it means to act politically and ethically today.

An extended and highly original meditation on the ambiguous figure of the hostage in modern life. -- Faisal Devji, Reader in Modern South Asian History at the University of Oxford, UK

ISBN: 9781441194848

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 472g

208 pages