Witnesses to war

"Fire is catching. And if we burn, then you burn with us.” Katniss Ever­deen brandishes this impassioned and defiant threat in the 2014 film The Hunger Games: Mockingjay–Part 1. Revo­lutions exact costs from all parties in­volved. The fire of war consumes winners and losers alike; this is the price invariably extracted by systems of violence.

An inordinate proportion of the costs are borne by the less powerful parties within a conflict. This silent majority, people on the street, bear the brunt of war and its aftermath. These three books illuminate the lives of everyday folks who are traumatized or displaced by violence and war. They reveal the lives behind the statistics.

“When revolution blows the lid off, all kinds of steam rush out.” With this admonition, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami in Burning Country draw us into the throes of the more than decadelong civil war in Syria. This war has left over a million people dead or wounded, four out of five Syrians living in poverty, over half of all children not attending school, and more than half of the country’s hospitals no longer functioning. The broad-scale collapse of Syrian infrastructure, the decimation of political economy, and the erasure of civil society have rendered Syria and its citizenry fractured beyond recognition. In this context, “radicalization is better named traumatization.”