No Friends but the Mountains ─ Dispatches from the World's Violent Highlands

A veteran war correspondent journeys to remote mountain communities across the globe?from Albania and Chechnya to Nepal and Colombia?to investigate why so many conflicts occur at great heights

Mountainous regions are home to only ten percent of the world’s population yet host a strikingly disproportionate share of the world’s conflicts. Mountains provide a natural refuge for those who want to elude authority, and their remoteness has allowed archaic practices to persist well into our globalized era.

As Judith Matloff shows, the result is a combustible mix we in the lowlands cannot afford to ignore. Traveling to conflict zones across the world, she introduces us to Albanian teenagers involved in ancient blood feuds; Mexican peasants hunting down violent poppy growers; and Jihadists who have resisted the Russian military for decades. At every stop, Matloff reminds us that the drugs, terrorism, and instability cascading down the mountainside affect us all.

A work of political travel writing in the vein of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Robert Kaplan, No Friends but the Mountains is an indelible portrait of the conflicts that have unexpectedly shaped our world.

Judith Matloff teaches conflict reporting at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times Magazine, Economist, and Christian Science Monitor. Matloff lives in New York City.