Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores how different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silences that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its own rules. This broad-ranging book discloses the universality of silence in the ways we think about war through examples ranging from the Spanish Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Armenian Genocide and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Bringing together scholarship on varied practices in different cultures, this book breaks new ground in the vast literature on memory, and opens up new avenues of reflection and research on the lingering aftermath of war.

"...Shadows of War is worth reading..." -Matthew B. Holmes, Military Review

"This collection of essays provides an innovative contribution to broadening the evaluation of silence as cultural practice by analyzing it across different conflict zones where memory is contested and history is troubled." -Angus Mitchell, Canadian Journal of History

"Shadows of War assembles well-written essays of a consistently high standard.It goes a considerable way towards achieving its goal of shifting the focusaway from the prevalent remembering-versus-forgetting binary towards an appreciation of what we might see as an intermediate position of silence. That is no mean feat." -Bill Niven, European History Quarterly