edges of care: living and dying in no man’s land

＂No man’s land. The term invokes stretches of barren landscape, scattered broken trees, twisted barbed wire, whistling wind. But as Noam Leshem shows in Edges of Care, there is so much more to no man’s land-unexamined complexities and political dynamics hidden within and around places deemed forgotten or lost. In often moving prose, Leshem interrogates no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. To understand the ramifications of such uncaring, Leshem takes the reader through a diverse series of abandoned places, including or bordering areas in Palestine, Syria, Colombia, Egypt, and Cyprus. There he shows that no man’s land is not empty of life, but almost always inhabited and, in fact, often generative of new modes of being＂--

Noam Leshem is an associate professor of political and cultural geography at Durham University. He is the author of Life After Ruin: The Struggles of Israel’s Depopulated Arab Spaces and is the co-creator of Portraits of No Man’s Land, a series of visual stories and documentaries produced with Google Arts & Culture in 2019.