When is a war not a war? When it is undertaken in the name of democracy, against the forces of racism, sexism, and religious and political persecution? This is the new world of warfare that Neda Atanasoski observes in Humanitarian Violence, different in name from the old imperialism but not so different in kind. In particular, she considers U.S. militarism—humanitarian militarism—during the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the 1990s wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia.

What this book brings to light—through novels, travel narratives, photojournalism, films, news media, and political rhetoric—is in fact a system of postsocialist imperialism based on humanitarian ethics. Humanitarian Violence identifies an emerging discourse of race that focuses on ideological and cultural differences and makes postsocialist and Islamic nations the potential targets of U.S. disciplining violence.
 

The Introduction and Chapter 4 will be available to read prior to the talk at:
http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/neda-book-2014.html

Please join us for a small reception in the Feminist Studies library following the reading.
 

Neda Atanasoski is an Associate Proressor in the Feminist Studies Department at UCSC. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of U.S and Eastern European media and cultural studies, with a focus on the politics of religion and sexuality, postsocialism, human rights and humanitarianism, and war and nationalism. Professor Atanasoski’s current research project, in collaboration with Kalindi Vora (UCSD), takes up the relationship between notions of the “network” and “revolution” in the postsocialist era as they assess the ethical frames and moral imperatives undergirding current-day modes of waging war, biomedical modes of extending life, and understanding the politics of dissent and consent that both use and critique the “revolutionary” technologies associated such social and political shifts of our postsocialist era.
 

Conversation and book reading presented by the Feminist Studies Department.