What is religious violence? What is jihad? Is jihad a useful way of understanding either religion or violence?
As both an anthropologist and a lawyer, Darryl Li is able to offer rare insights into - and critiques of - these questions by focusing on the lives of real people. Published after more than a decade of research in a half-dozen countries and multiple languages, Li's new book, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020), is an account of two competing forms of universalism - Islamist jihad and American empire - in the Balkans during the years following the Cold War.
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