Intimate Enemies is the long-awaited extended revision of Kimberly Theidon's Entre prójimos: el conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1st edition 2004, 2nd edition 2009). A decade or so has given Theidon time to consolidate some of her initial thinking around post-conflict Andean Peru and to expand the study significantly thanks to additional fieldwork material. Intimate Enemies is a tour de force: it seamlessly blends a profound analysis of extensive conversations, interviews and observations conducted over a period of more than 15 years in some villages and towns in the department of Ayacucho, the ‘cradle’ of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL), with the existing comparative literature on transitional justice, collective violence and medical anthropology. This research is presented through the lens of Theidon's personal experience of being an ‘engaged anthropologist’. The conflict in Peru between SL and counterinsurgency forces (1980–2000) was particularly violent, with more than half of the 70,000 killed and disappeared attributed, according to Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the ‘revolutionary forces’. But, as Theidon argues, this was not simply a war between insurgents and the Peruvian military: there was a ‘“third fire”, comprised of peasants themselves’ (p. 5). Intimate Enemies attempts to explain how peasants living at the margins of the state ‘learned to kill [their] brothers’ (p. 5). It is very difficult to account for mass violence without erasing the grey areas that exist between perpetrator and victim. It is also very difficult to do research among a traumatised and partly complicit population that is also marginalised from national political narratives and practices. Because Theidon does both these things, and does them well, her book is a key contribution to the growing body of literature examining the Peruvian conflict. Moreover, Theidon is also a great storyteller, and she is able to make a good read out of a long and harrowing story.

Theidon set out to study how those living in the villages and towns of Ayacucho understand the violence that dominated their lives in the 1980s and well into the 1990s. Together with a team of local researchers, she worked in seven communities in the provinces of Huanta, Accomarca and Víctor Fajardo – provinces with particular genealogies of violence, providing for contrasting political trajectories. But this book is not a study of local political histories – rather, it is an ethnography of violence that focuses on classic anthropological themes. Intimate Enemies explores the different ways in which people in the communities studied understand health and healing, illness, death and killing, justice, repentance, revenge and reconciliation, silence and speech, and what it means to be human. Fragmented and contradictory understandings exist side by side as biomedical, ‘traditional’, legal and a variety of religious practices converge, to give one example, in the administration of health and justice.

While Theidon rightly criticises the idea of the Andean comunidad as a coherent and inherently benign entity, it is at the community level that Intimate Enemies provides us with most insight. A community, Theidon argues, is not a fixed social, cultural or geographical entity. Community is rather a term that refers to a collective of people living together as best as they can, but sometimes with devastating results. It is this aspect of Theidon's story that will have most impact on our understanding of violence in Andean Peru during the 1980s and 1990s: by listening to the subjective accounts of those who lived the violence up close, she presents us with a local history of killing and of surviving, not so much at the individual level (although the many stories that this book recounts do give us an idea of individuals’ struggles), but particularly at the community level.

As Theidon shows, the ‘local reconciliation processes’ which are increasingly promoted by global transitional justice practitioners as an alternative to national or international criminal justice are in fact less about actual reconciliation than about learning to live together through a range of strategies focused on survival. Certainly, in the practices of internally displaced persons returning to their homes in the Andes, or those who are integrated into neighbouring villages as arrepentidos (ex-Senderista ‘repentant ones’), or among neighbours who know what they have done to each other and to others, there are elements of ‘traditional’ indigenous practices of justice. But most striking is people's creativity in mixing Christian traditions of confession and repentance, the rule of law and extra-judicial punishment, and understandings of historical relations between indigenous authorities, hacendados and comuneros in the local administration of restorative and retributive justice. Through this non-linear use of existing frameworks of justice, which produce a socially acceptable collective memory and deter further acts of vengeance, the worst-affected populations and villages in the Ayacucho Andes have managed to break the cycle of violence. But, Theidon insists, this is not the same as reconciliation, and many people and families live with fear, pain, material deprivation and feelings of profound injustice.

At a time in which transitional justice has become a booming global business of policy, practice and research, but also a media-friendly story whose purpose is to muster support for difficult-to-finance processes of transitional justice in Latin America, Africa and Asia, it is important to recognise the complexity of political violence. Intimate Enemies shows us that there is nothing simple or straightforward about such violence. Rather, historical processes, the local, national and global politics of aid, and structural violence feed into the very localised experiences of fear and mistrust, and thus into the emergence of intimate enemies. The global community that is committed to transitional justice tends to overlook local experiences and processes that are messy, non-linear and ambiguous. It also tends to overlook the role of those involved in violence on the ground in creating a politics that allows them to break cycles of violence that would otherwise destroy them. Growing critiques of transitional justice are mostly directed at the lack of attention to structural violence and ‘sticky’ inequalities in its processes and mechanisms. Theidon effectively shows that the messiness of violence is reflected in the messiness of understandings and practices of justice and reconciliation, and that a failure to recognise these again tends to sideline the population group that was worst affected by that violence and by the historical persistence of inequality. Theidon's book is a ‘must read’ for anthropologists and analysts of mass violence, but also for all those concerned with transitional justice processes.