The Cunning of Gender Violence

“The Cunning of Gender Violence is a riveting and much-needed interdisciplinary collection that aims both to understand and radically shift the securitized, racialized, and imperial approaches to gender violence that dominate law, policy, and the media. Compellingly calling on feminists to recognize the Faustian bargain they have struck by perpetuating these dominant approaches, the book brings to the fore lives and experiences that have often been relegated to the margins of global feminist attention, even as they are at the center of multiple forms of quotidian global and state violence.” - Karen Engle, author of author of The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law

“Those committed to an anti-Muslim agenda appoint themselves as modern, humanitarian, democratic, and feminist, a status achieved against a Third World constituted as premodern, illiberal, Muslim, and uniquely given to gender-based violence. It is a major contribution of this book to show how global racial governance is achieved through the idea of gender-based violence as a defining feature of Third World cultures and communities.” - Sherene H. Razack, author of Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism

"A remarkable piece of work within the realm of geopolitical feminism. ... It stands out for its sharp acumen and the detailed analysis of scholars who have dedicated themselves to researching and confronting gender-based violence against women in various global contexts."

"In brief, this volume represents a thorough investigation and assessment of the trajectory of the feminist project to combat violence against women in the wider context of global and local circuits of religious and political power. Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." - A. Rassam, Choice

"The Cunning of Gender Violence is part of a growing corpus of critical feminist scholarship dedicated to the politics of gender violence. It is a necessary and long-awaited theoretical intervention. . . . It provides indispensable ethnographic accounts of GBVAW’s operations among non-Western societies." - Zina Sawaf, Journal of Anthropological Research