Collateral damages: Tracing the debts and displacements of the Iraq War By NadiaEl‐Shaarawi, Oakland: University of California Press. 2025. 239 pp.

Nadia El-Shaarawi's Collateral Damage is a timely and powerful ethnography that examines how imperial and humanitarian interventions—namely, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent resettlement of displaced Iraqis—have worked in tandem to erase Iraqi refugees’ experiences and aspirations while erasing the impact of imperial violence on Iraqis themselves. Focusing on refugees who fled to Cairo between 2006 and 2008, the book seeks to build an archive of war that centers Iraqi voices by tracing the existential and political precarity, along with the bureaucratic labyrinth, they must navigate for years—sometimes decades—after displacement. To explain why Iraqis’ perspectives have been absent or marginalized in media coverage, military analyses, and humanitarian discourse, El-Shaarawi advances the concepts of collateral damage and imperial unknowing. Though formulated in relation to the US invasion of Iraq, these concepts illuminate a broader pattern repeatedly invoked by the US military and humanitarian organizations in other contexts where US interventions have produced mass displacement and pervasive violence. Together, these concepts absolve the US military of responsibility for the harms of invasion by mobilizing a rhetoric of care and ignorance, and obfuscating the entanglement of imperial violence and humanitarianism (16). El-Shaarawi observes that, in military parlance, “collateral damage” frames civilian casualties as a tragic but unavoidable byproduct of military necessity. This framing simultaneously renders civilian deaths and injuries agentless and unintentional while turning a blind eye to the destruction of infrastructure and land essential to civilian life. Although intended to humanize war by military personnel, collateral damage is better understood as “a calculated indifference”—a deliberate and integral feature of contemporary warfare that enables states to claim compliance with international law even as they kill and injure civilians (8). Alongside this, El-Shaarawi introduces the concept of imperial unknowing, a set of imperial practices rooted in hubris, ignorance, and denial that function “to obscure forms of responsibility and relatedness” and are thus central to liberal imperial violence and its disavowal of collateral damage (14). Strikingly, both concepts are mobilized not only by the US military and media but also by humanitarian organizations. Whereas mainstream US discourses by the media and the military often characterize the invasion of Iraq as a “mistake” to be forgotten, humanitarian organizations rely on vulnerability as a criterion for resettlement, rarely interrogating why or how Iraqi refugees were displaced and rendered vulnerable in the first place. By examining the experiences of Iraqi refugees—particularly their displacement from Iraq to Egypt and their efforts to resettle elsewhere—El-Shaarawi underscores refugees’ epistemologies that challenge and refuse “militarized and humanitarian ways of knowing” (10). In her examination of the ways imperial unknowing shaped the US invasion of Iraq, El-Shaarawi explores Donald Rumsfeld's infamous invocation of “unknown unknowns” to exaggerate Saddam Hussein's threat and sell the invasion to allies; the role of mainstream US media in framing the occupation as a project of “freedom and democracy” while failing to interrogate the administration's evidence; and US officials’ Orientalist understanding of Iraqi society in sectarian terms, which culminated in the imposition of a sectarian quota system. These strategies—instrumentalizing ignorance, denial, indifference, and disavowal—served to justify intervention while erasing its human costs. El-Shaarawi also engages with questions of knowledge production and archival practices. On one level, she highlights how Iraqi archives, museums, libraries, and cultural institutions “became a very literal weapon in the US-led war in Iraq.” Their destruction and looting underscored “the struggle over who can, and should, tell the story of the Iraq War” (85). On another level, El-Shaarawi seeks to foreground a different archive: the narratives Iraqis construct as they recount the horrors of occupation and confront the uncertainty of resettlement and severed communication. These testimonies form both a war archive and a refugee archive. In resisting erasure, they subvert imperial unknowing and reclaim knowledge “for justice, for the love of family, for the desire to tell the truth”—revealing what empire has sought to conceal (88). In addition, the author focuses on how humanitarian organizations—such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration—employ the same techniques of ignorance and disavowal used by the US military when dealing with Iraqi refugees. As El-Shaarawi eloquently puts it, “The resettlement process often denies, ignores, or renders problematic refugees’ desire …” (126). Resettlement is an intricate, transnational assemblage of laws and practices, shaped by host states’ calculations about refugees as potential national security threats, and involves heterogeneous local procedures. Combined with the use of vulnerability and deservedness as criteria for resettlement, this leaves Iraqi refugees in Egypt in a state of prolonged waiting and uncertainty. This sense of injustice is compounded by the demand for extensive documentation to corroborate their testimonies—an expectation that is nearly impossible to meet, as many fled their homes hastily due to violence. Some Iraqi refugees who worked with the US occupation can apply directly for resettlement in the United States through the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act (the Direct Access Program), yet they still face the challenge of navigating the ally/enemy binary of the post-9/11 era. Though resettled as US allies, they are simultaneously racialized as potential terrorists because they are Arab or Muslim. In this way, humanitarianism and military intervention form a continuum of imperial relations—namely collateral damage—rooted in an unequal encounter between Iraqi refugees and the imperial institutions that govern their fate. One notable limitation of the book is its frequent use of the term “the Iraq War” in both the title and throughout the text. Although the author is careful to frame the work as an account of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, this phrasing risks obscuring the historical reality that the United States conducted an illegal occupation rather than engaging in a war between two equal powers. In Iraqi everyday accounts, major regional and international events since 1980 are always specified—the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War of 1991, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq—precisely to underscore their distinct political and moral dimensions. By contrast, the unqualified phrase “the Iraq War” risks flattening this historical specificity and reproducing a US-centric framing. A second limitation is that, despite the book's conceptual sophistication and rich analysis, the author's analytic voice tends to dominate, leaving less space for Iraqi voices than one might expect given the stated aims of the project. For instance, the book would have been strengthened by the inclusion of a detailed case study tracing the experience of a single Iraqi refugee through the resettlement process. Such a narrative could have powerfully conveyed the suffocating opacity of bureaucratic systems and the persistent conditions of uncertainty that define not only Iraqi refugee resettlement but the refugee experience more broadly. Nevertheless, this work offers an incisive and indispensable examination of the entangled effects of imperial and humanitarian interventions. Its thematic breadth, conceptual rigor, and lucid prose make it a valuable text for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms. It will also appeal to scholars across disciplines, including American studies, anthropology, history, Middle Eastern studies, migration and displacement studies, military history, and humanitarian studies. Ultimately, this book makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on US military interventions by centering the lived experiences of civilians—individuals who are too often rendered faceless and nameless in official and mainstream narratives of empire—and by showing how they endure and navigate multiple, overlapping forms of imperial violence.