How does an inquiry into life as it lives (or dies) amid mass violence look like from the perspective of the “social”? Taking us from Sierra Leone to India to Lebanon, Life, Emergent challenges conventional understandings of biopolitics, and views the politics of life through the lens of life, not death.

Yasmeen Arif focuses closely on biopolitics’ other pole: “making live”, by highlighting the various means and forms of life that are shaped in the aftermath—or afterlives—of violent events, in the contexts of law, justice, community, and identity. Her analysis of the social repercussions of violence is both global and local in scope. This rigorously argued book brings together the various strands of both life and the social, and thereby frames a politics both of and in life.

This book will be useful to post-graduate scholars and researchers in Sociology, Social Anthropology, Political Science and Theory, Philosophy, Social Theory, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies and International Law. It will also be of interest to organizations involved in formal humanitarian work in conflict areas.