Introduction

What are the psychosocial and cultural ‘imprints’ of war on people whom the war targets, affects and implicates, directly and indirectly? What is war for them as a lived experience? Attempts to address these questions necessarily extend beyond discourses of national security and defence, regional politics, accounts of the destruction to life, heritage and infrastructures, and the movement of people seeking protection from war, to also include categories and perspectives from studies of affect, feeling, memory, imagination, desire, creativity and the unconscious. They often combine registers of the extraordinary and of the quotidian in relation to ‘war experience’.