Hostage Spaces of the Contemporary Islamicate World ― Phantom Territoriality

How is hostage space
constructed? In
this age-long procedure found in conflicts around the world, strange forms of
terror and intimacy arise, particularly in the contemporary Islamic cultures of
Chechnya, Albania, and Bosnia. This book investigates the modes of desire and
politics found in kidnapping, in order to reveal the voices of victims and
kidnappers that often remain closed up. Dejan Lukic explores
the spaces where hostages and hostage takers come into contact - spaces of
accident, sacrifice, hope, and catastrophe - or, in other words, the spaces
that announce utopias bound to fail. In this book, the figures of the
victim, the terrorist, the sovereign, the resistance fighter and the witness -
among others - emerge with a new face; one that will contribute to our
understandings of what it means to act politically and ethically today.

Dejan Lukic is Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA.