Book review: Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land

In Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land, Noam Leshem challenges us to unlearn and deconstruct our imaginaries of the prevalent yet theoretically narrow idea of no man’s land. The normative imaginaries of no man’s land, Leshem contends, conjure up visuals of desolate landscapes, exploded trees, barbed-wire fences, and the strewn, discarded objects of war. They are also, importantly, imagined as empty of life. Indeed, Leshem proclaims three clichés of no man’s land which he challenges. First, that it is empty and devoid of human life. Second, that ownership and tenure of the space is absent. Third, that it is exclusively a border phenomenon. These imaginaries and clichés, the book argues, have turned no man’s land into a “convenient metaphor”, in turn flattening “historical specificities and political nuances” (p.3). Leshem confronts this notion, conceptualising no man’s land as a space which has been abandoned by sovereign power, and meticulously evidencing the lives and communities that resist, endure, and create within this environment.