Against Humanity

“A courageous call for a revolutionary medicine to upset and upend the western, enlightened, global interventions by humanitarian doctors who are collaborators with the state and fueled by international donors and ecumenic interests to crush a guerrilla insurrection in the jungles of Uganda. Sam Dubal’s Against Humanity is an intimate portrait of the political passions, logical mysticism, crazy hubris, and humor of Joseph Kony’s soldiers, who were demonized by the West. This turning of the tables is ethnographic anthropology at its best: the difficult science that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. The dangers of humanity and its pomps and its perils are made painfully clear."—Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

"A bold book, and a brave one. Swimming against the intellectual currents of our time, Dubal uses his ethnographic encounter with the Lord's Resistance Army to ask searching questions about the damage done by discourses of humanity and forms of moral reasoning that that render some people’s violence (and not others’) inhuman. His far-reaching argument challenges all those who would do good (in Africa or elsewhere) to think beyond humanist ethics by engaging with a wider set of social and political contexts and commitments."— James Ferguson, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Stanford University

"This book is a challenging, committed, and open work that puts forth a comprehensive case for abandoning some of our most basic moral and intellectual articles of faith. It represents a novel intervention into the literature of political violence and its aftermath in Africa, and more broadly into anthropological debates around fundamental questions of ontology, politics, and ethics."—Adam Branch, Director, Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge