Through global case studies that explore biometric identification, border control, forensics, militarized policing, and counterterrorism, the contributors show how bodies have become critical sources of evidence that is organized and deployed to classify, recognize, and manage human life.

Tracing the college experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, Ellen Moore challenges the popular narratives that explain student veterans' academic difficulties while showing how these narratives and institutional support for the military lead to suppression of campus debate about the wars, discourage anti-war activism, and encourage a growing militarization.

Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.

In Exiled Home, Susan Bibler Coutin recounts the experiences of Salvadoran children who migrated with their families to the United States during the 1980–1992 civil war. Because of their youth and the violence they left behind, as well as their uncertain legal status in the United States, many grew up with distant memories of El Salvador and a profound sense of disjuncture in their adopted homeland. Through interviews in both countries, Coutin examines how they sought to understand and overcome the trauma of war and displacement through such strategies as recording community histories, advocating for undocumented immigrants, forging new relationships with the Salvadoran state, and, for those deported from the United States, reconstructing their lives in El Salvador. In focusing on the case of Salvadoran youth, Coutin’s nuanced analysis shows how the violence associated with migration can be countered through practices that recuperate historical memory while also reclaiming national membership.

In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the lives of a group of Somali Bantu refugees over the course of three decades, from their pre-civil war homes and terrible experiences in Kenyan refugee camps, to their recent resettlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine.

In this ethnography of the Cancha mega-market in Cochabama, Bolivia, Daniel M. Goldstein examines what it means for the market's poorest vendors to maintain personal safety and economic stability by navigating systems of informality and illegality and how this dynamic is representative of the neoliberal modern city.