Afterwards and Other Non-Endings: Palestine, Afghanistan, and the Afterlives of War

A poetics of living rebellion: Sociocultural anthropology in 2021

“…The “non‐endings,” or ongoingness of colonial and imperial wars, settler‐colonial vanishment, racial subjugation, militarism, intergenerational loss and trauma, and climate and environmental disasters continue to shape the modern world even as we attempt to imagine what it will mean to be human in the “wake of the West” (Thomas 2021). Still, “while wars continue even when they are said to be over, there are also the nonendings of homeland, kinship, joint struggle, music, gardens and life,” writes Lila Sharif (2021, 170).…”

“…The declarative “end” of the war on terror , leaving in its wake 800,000 dead and another 550,000 Afghans internally displaced, juxtaposed with the chaotic US withdrawal and abandonment of thousands attempting to flee to safety amid the Taliban's immediate takeover of Kabul, is a haunting reminder of US empire and its afterlives in the wake of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 (Sharif 2021, 166). The “non‐endings,” or ongoingness of colonial and imperial wars, settler‐colonial vanishment, racial subjugation, militarism, intergenerational loss and trauma, and climate and environmental disasters continue to shape the modern world even as we attempt to imagine what it will mean to be human in the “wake of the West” (Thomas 2021).…”