Who and under what circumstances has the right to speak for the universal? That is the question animating Darryl Li's engaging, provocative, and analytically robust book, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity. The book investigates one of the most sensational as well as poorly understood aspects of the 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina—the involvement of hundreds of foreign Muslim fighters who fought alongside Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) to preserve the newly independent post-Yugoslav state. In doing so, this work also models the kind of transnational ethnography that is capable of pushing past the often-limiting confines of area studies, without sacrificing the depth of its engagement with specific histories, people, and places.

Comprising an introduction and seven chapters, Universal Enemy is the result of over a decade of multisited fieldwork, primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which provides its central ethnographic mise-en-scène, but on occasion also in other places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, where its author locates his interlocutors many years after the war. Li, who is trained as a political and legal anthropologist, as well as a human rights lawyer, relies on a variety of linguistic, historical, and professional forms of expertise to make sense of the Muslim fighters (mujahids) not as the monstrous avatars of the Global War on Terror, but as a complex and heterogenous formation of mobile actors engaged in an effort to produce a different kind of a universalism. The result is a fascinating, at times poignant, but always stirring book, which stages an anthropological challenge to mainstream conceptualizations of jihad in particular, and political violence in general.

Li develops in this book a conceptualization of universalism as a structure of aspiration, whose relationship to empirical reality is often tenuous but nevertheless posits a horizon of belonging grounded in a promise of transcendence of difference. To call something as seemingly particular as jihad a universalist project might strike readers in the west as odd—but this is precisely Li's point. Not all universalisms are recognized as worthy of carrying that mantle—and that delineation is often a matter of specific configurations of power and authority, rather than of the inherent normative validity of any of their claims. Importantly, as Li himself makes explicit, given the violence that universalist projects often unleash and sometimes demand, naming something universalism should not be understood as compliment. That said, as a framing device, universalism makes it possible to perceive jihad in relation to other transcendent formations, including the International Community, humanitarian intervention, and human rights. There is theoretical purchase in reading jihad in these terms, instead of through the language of incommensurability or radical alterity, to which illiberal social configurations are often subjected.

True to its promise to foreground diasporic rather than parochial dimensions of this social formation, the focus of the first full chapter of Li's book are the circuits of mobility that led these fighters to Bosnia. Unlike the introduction, which roots the reader in the sweltering heat of the midsize Bosnian town of Zenica, Chapter 1 sets of to explore these men's varied life trajectories that span multiple geographies, differential class backgrounds, and doctrinal orientations, and uneven histories of conscription and soldiering. This diversity aside, Li argues that the jihad in Bosnia was a markedly European phenomenon, one that interpellated with special force Muslims living in the west, either as migrant laborers, diasporan subjects, or converts.

Chapter 2, entitled “Locations” returns us to the Bosnia proper, to make sense of the encounter of mujahids with local Muslims, whom they intended to defend. Li's account problematizes the commonplace narratives that pit the “rigid” Arabian Salafi Islam against its presumably more flexible and open-ended Bosnian counterpart. Indeed, the arrival of foreign Muslim fighters generated tensions with local Muslims, many of whom had been thoroughly secularized during the preceding decades of communist rule. Mujahids’ desire to offer spiritual guidance to what appeared to be Muslims lapsed in their faith met significant resistance, not only from the population but also from the local religious authorities. And yet, as Li effectively shows, the mujahids found comrades among Bosnian Muslims who had already been participating in the incipient revival movements that began in the late 1980s. However, even those pious Bosniak fighters, Li shows, espoused a range of complex and non-essentialist political and doctrinal orientations.

The aim of the third chapter is to consider the foreign fighter as a troubling figure in relation to both the project of Bosnian statehood and international law that takes the nation-state as its presupposition. Via an analysis of miracles, and drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, Li searches in this chapter for an alternative model of political theology that does not take for granted but maintains an ambivalent relationship to the state form. The following chapter picks up on a different set of tensions that pivot around the forms of diversity that structured the Bosnian jihad, which are also mirrored in the transnational and global community of Muslims (umma). Li shows how the mujahids and their local hosts sought to respond to and process the differences among them, which sometimes resulted in the production of both metaphorical and literal kinship relations. We catch a glimpse in this chapter of one material effect of the fighters’ presence: marriages with local women. While this phenomenon is often read in purely instrumentalist terms, Li proposes instead that we take affinity, commitment to virtuous conduct, as well as two-way exoticized desire seriously as the underpinnings of these new types of relationality.

The second half of the book, which is prefaced by an interlude, is dedicated to understanding jihad in relation to other, at times competing universalisms, including the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), UN Peacekeeping, and the Global War on Terror. Chapter 5 deals with NAM and its aftermath as another site of transnational encounters, centering foreign students, many of whom were of Arab origin. It maps out a history of international relations that marked the latter half of the twentieth century and became reframed in surprising ways when some of these foreign students and their progeny became conscripted as translators and cultural brokers during the Bosnian war. The following chapter looks at the unlikely convergences between the UN Peacekeeping forces and the mujahids that brings together colonial histories of conscription of non-white soldiers with novel cycles of labor mobility. Li critically engages in this chapter the figure of the non-white, and in many cases Muslim, peacekeepers deployed to manage a war on a European periphery. The concluding chapter on the Global War on Terror stages the most poignant confrontation with the kind of politics and knowledge production that has been Li's anathema throughout his book, one that is tied to American empire. Despite its greater goals, this chapter remains deeply ethnographic, documenting the travails of fighters who were in the aftermath of 2001 stripped of their naturalized Bosnian citizenship—and despite having families and living peaceful lives—surrendered to the US security apparatus and its satellite operations.

There are many reasons to recommend this book to the readers of Slavic Review. In light of its innovative methodological approach—one that its author terms an “ethnographic history from below”—Universal Enemy presents a fine example of what a transnational research project might look like, especially one that takes up spatial mobility, political violence, and racial formation as its objects. Li's attentiveness to the racial hierarchies that span Non-Alignment, UN peacekeeping, and the jihad in Bosnia is particularly timely as Eastern European Studies reckon with their own longstanding inattentiveness to both regional and global forms of racialization. What is more, Li's sustained, recursive, and embedded critique of methodological nationalism provides an exemplary model for current and future scholars of the Balkans, who must remap their analytical horizons in the wake of the Balkan refugee route and new waves of labor emigration. Indeed, this book will serve well the up-and-coming scholars of refugee studies, interested in the intersections of racialized border regimes and humanitarianism.

As a Bosnianist, I appreciated that this ethnography of what in many respects were marginal actors in the Bosnian war, still manages to provide a rich account of highly localized spaces and places where these transnational actors first converged. This is most definitely an ethnography of wartime and post-war Bosnia, albeit one that takes the non-essentialist promise of anthropology a step further than most, and in so doing offers a broader framework for understanding what tends to be cast as a very particular history. The book's enduring contribution, in addition to its theoretical interventions relating to the concept of universalism, is the fact that it reinscribes the mujahid not as a singular but as a plural historical subject. In Bosnia, the Katiba (mujahids’ unit) has been an object of mystery, fascination, and sometimes even fear among Bosniaks and non-Bosniaks alike. But most people, safe from a few who lived or fought alongside them, do not possess much deep insight into the lived experience or struggles of these men.

This being said, I sometimes wished that this work gave more ethnographic insight into how civilians in Bosnia, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, perceived, interacted with, and made sense of these soldiers, who had come to fight in “other people's wars.” The bulk of the ethnographic account about Bosnians’ own perceptions of these figures comes from those that soldiered alongside them, and the written accounts of Bosniak religious and political authorities. I imagine Li would agree that the presence of transnational fighters and/or aid workers generated effects that spread well beyond those groups and the few towns in Central Bosnia where these groups were typically stationed. Finally, at the end of the day, this is a profoundly masculinist ethnography—not by choice, but in effect—as Li understandably struggled to interview women who became these men's spouses and relations. Ethnographies centering the experiences of these women are yet to be written.

Last but not least, even if the book's radical orientation means its central aim is to critique rather than offer an alternative set of moralizing tropes, Universal Enemy does, despite itself and perhaps inevitably, humanize its subject. It is a timely book, especially at a time when this reviewer and this readership is witnessing the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan, which will likewise demand a different kind of critical reckoning.