With this book, James completes a trilogy of monographs on the Uduk people of the Sudan/Ethiopia borderlands which bears comparison with her teacher, E. E. Evans-Pritchard's, famous Nuer trilogy. James has worked for over forty-five years with the group who are generally known – if known at all – as ‘the Uduk’. In this time, she has followed their history of survival (the key word in the subtitle of her first book, Kwanim Pa: the making of the Uduk people – an ethnographic study of survival in the Sudan–Ethiopia borderlands, 1979) in the face of conflict, suffering and multiple displacement. Her linguistic and other ethnographic skills are today unparalleled in the region. Unlike Evans-Pritchards Nuer books, however, her work is as historically and politically aware as it is ethnographically deep and anthropologically sophisticated. It represents something of a climax (one hopes not an ending) to the long-standing engagement of the University of Oxford's Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology with the peoples of North East Africa.

The present work focuses on the effects of the ‘Second Sudanese civil war’ (1983–2005) on the Uduk, whose homeland was destroyed in 1987. Since then, the bulk of the Uduk people have crossed the Sudan/Ethiopia border at least five times, while others have been displaced to Khartoum and South Sudan, and some have even made their way to the United States. Although firmly grounded in the oral histories of individuals, the book does not just concentrate on the lives of a small and insignificant group of people in an obscure corner of North East Africa, but looks at the wider role of international forces and agencies as well as their local results. Paradoxically (but characteristically for James), after pages of harrowing detail of tragedy and suffering, it ends with chapters on dance, music, poetry and religious innovation that testify to the strength and creativity of the human spirit in the face of events that most of us, fortunately, can barely imagine.

As a fine contemporary multi-sited, multifaceted ethnography, War and Survival will be read by all anthropologists interested in North East Africa, but ought to reach a much wider audience of historians, political scientists, sociologists and representatives of many other disciplines, as well as aid and development workers. In fact, it would be worth reading for all those working on conflict, borderlands, refugees, religion and the arts (among many other topics) in Africa and elsewhere. It reflects James' innovative and sophisticated approach to analysing the relationship between contemporary history and the longue durée. It also represents an informed yet subtle indictment of the role of the so-called ‘international community’ in responding to war and persecution. As Alex de Waal writes on the back cover, it should be studied by ‘anyone wishing to understand the experience of war or genocide’.

All this may sound depressing, but there are so many aspects of the book that are lighter, and even humorous; I particularly liked the Uduk satirical songs she translates. To declare an interest, James was my doctoral supervisor and I am a long-standing admirer of her work. But that is not why I am unusually enthusiastic in my praise of this remarkable book. I believe it is a very important work and that it should be widely read. I also believe that those who do so will tend to agree with me.