A War on People ― Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community

In a contemporary condition increasingly characterized by widely diffused complexity and war as governance, how do we conduct political activity and what might be its aim? A War on People takes up these questions to offer a glimpse at a possible alternative future through an ethnographically and theoretically rich look at the political and ethical activity of some unlikely political actors: active and former users of heroin and crack cocaine. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity enacts through processes of worldbuilding non-normative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key ethical-political concepts as community, freedom, and care.

Jarrett Zigon is the William and Linda Porterfield Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His two most recent books are Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding and "HIV is God’s Blessing": Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia.