In 1941, Franz Alexander wrote in a pessimistic tone, “Since we know that war has always been the usual way of settling conflicts between groups, we might ask how peace is possible at all … as far as the history of ancient and western civilization is concerned, periods of peace were nothing but preparations for a coming war … the history of civilized mankind is a history of wars interrupted by preparations for more wars” (pp. 505–6). In parallel to this old enunciation on the seeming endurance of war as an unbounded condition of humanity, the editors of this volume revisit some deep-seated anthropological debates in hopes of shedding new light on violence and war as elemental topics. The editors and contributors draw on ethnography and analysis of secondary sources to call attention to the need for critical assessments and theoretical analysis of war as a cultural and global phenomenon. The editors propose an understanding of war, not as an anomaly, but rather as an integral and sustaining part of sociocultural reproduction at the level of national governments and international corporations (13).

I will not pretend here to present a complete review of this complex volume. The editors and authors offer interesting contributions on the myriad ways in which contemporary violence has been imagined and wars have been fought by rebel groups, national armies, and multinational corporations. The chapters present a diverse range of cases, from the U.S. military and related institutions to war-torn Iraq, Afghanistan, Uganda, and Pakistan, and cultural practices of violence in the Guyana Highlands, Guatemala, and Tanzania. However, due partly to the diversity and complexity of the materials each chapter presents, their articulations with some of the central themes proposed by the editors remain less persuasive. The volume blossoms if one reads and appreciates each chapter for itself. But here I will focus on some of the editorsapos; central themes.

One of these is their theorization of contemporary wars. They propose links between Third World inhabitants who are believed to inflict injury and death by ritual and invisible means (sorcery) and the commitment of Euro-American military forces to virtual war (computer, satellite, and visual technologies). The editors sustain this theme by anchoring to other anthropologists that have followed similar trains of thought, such as that governance and war machines constitute forms of sorcery, or that the International Monetary Fund and global corporations are like sorcerers. Conceptually this formulation is imaginative, since sorcery violence and cyberspace wars both tap into imaginaries of invisible violence/war and killings. Yet the affinities of these two dimensions of violence and killing remain mostly at the level of anthropological rhetoric. The immense anthropological literature on witchcraft, magic, and assault sorcery, which the editors are amply familiar with, has flourished by remaining close to the believers' world. Despite fluctuations in tandem with socio-political and technological changes, a key feature of such believers the world over is the mystery that for them surrounds the agency of alleged sorcerers, spirits, and their victims.

The concealment further sustains the ambivalence that permeates most understandings of magic as dangerous, protective, destructive or constructive, of magic as convertible, indifferent, and impersonal, but in the process of becoming an unknown force. We do not require a sophisticated analysis to grasp that cyberspace wars are founded upon a quite different ontology, whereby agency and intentionality are hidden for reasons of control and monopoly of weapons industry markets and, to a certain extent, the ability to kill with impunity. It is this division, rather than the convergence, that emerges from all the book's chapters, even though the editors labor to insist, “Sorcery is not just analogous with virtual war, it is continuous with it—it even ‘is’ it” (2), and the contributors sometimes succinctly animate this argument. Frazer, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and other founding anthropologists wrote on the continuum of magic and science as an invitation for emancipatory thinking regarding the cultural, religious, and technological diversity of the human condition, but in this volume the analogy is devoid of that earlier meaning. Accepting that magic and virtual war are one and the same thing unintentionally trivializes the labor of killing and the magnitude of death that is unfolding in places that are the focus of cyberspace wars. Even when such analogies are proffered to support imaginative work in anthropology, one must seriously question the virtues of deploying them to enhance knowledge of the dynamics of sorcery violence and cyberspace wars in the era of globalization.

Another theme that the editors address is that of global war. They define it, not in terms of its geographical scope or the diversity of the civilian-military actors and targets involved, but rather in temporal terms, as “basically a cycle of violence without any certain ending” (8). This is an interesting notion, again, even though the editors and contributors do not analyze why certain cycles of violence seem to be unending, other than that they are part of social and cultural reproduction. The tricky thing here is, if wars are embedded in socio-cultural dynamics of reproduction, then why should they end? And when certain wars do end, does that also mean the end of cultural reproduction?

Additionally, for purposes of multidisciplinarity, to which violence/war is one of the most inviting socio-cultural themes, parallels could be traced with those notions of intractable conflicts or intractable war that are familiar in political science circles. In this regard, a comparative analysis could help to clarify the specific meanings of the notion of “global war.”

It seems that the creativity of this book's analysis lies more in its invitation to critically reflect on how competition and defeat, domination and resistance, and war and peace in the modern era survive by inspiring ways of living and methods of acting in the world that modernity has too hastily relegated to the past. This is more interesting than to say that the technologies and human agency that drive the drones that kill in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan are forms of sorcery. Unless of course, when we study the multifarious meanings of witchcraft, sorcery, and magic we fixate on the dimension of “invisibility.” Despite my criticisms on these specific issues, the volume overall is well worth reading, and I am certain that it will generate rich debates and agendas for future research.