Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Global, International, and Area Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Israel/Palestine studying controversies over historical narratives, nationalism, religiosity, and secularity. Her previous publications include Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (OUP, 2011). She is the Associate Editor for Israel and Palestine for the Review of Middle East Studies.

"[T]heoretically rich..."--The Journal of Religion

"Provocative...Producing Spoilers is a compelling book."--Journal of Palestine Studies

"Joyce Dalsheim's book on inclusive peacemaking has much to offer scholars who focus on issues such as identity politics and what she calls 'the tyranny of nationalism' It has special relevance for 'nonacademic' activist scholars like me... I found Dalsheim's book thought provoking and an important corrective to attempts to impose a narrative and political program -- even a progressive one." --American Anthropologist

"Joyce Dalsheim's book is a timely contribution to a deeper understanding of the various and contradictory narratives of Israelis and Palestinians. These are voices and views of great importance for any hoped-for peace, and yet they have been given hardly any voice by the dominant political frameworks of peace processes. Here you will find the sensitive eyes and ears of a cultural anthropologist who provides a much more nuanced reading of all the parties to the conflict. The deeper empathic understanding of these parties and their worldviews is the only hope for short term and long term solutions that involve the least amount of violence and the greatest hope for a realistic path of justice and fairness to all communities affected by this century-old conflict." --Marc Gopin, James H. Laue Professor of World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University

"This book simultaneously engages and challenges the current fashion for the reification of 'the enemy' à la Carl Schmitt. With a moving synthesis of ethnography and theory, Dalsheim studies the site where the 'enemy effect' is produced, in part through the very rhetoric of 'conflict resolution.' The radical message of her work is that in a true search for peace, no one-not even the most 'inconvenient'-may be left behind." --Jonathan Boyarin, Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Cornell University

"Nation, narration, recognition -- these are among the complicated terms that oscillate, rather than mediate, between war and peace. They reach deep into entrenched certainties and familiar divisions. In Israel/Palestine, Dalsheim reminds us, they endure as 'alibis of failure'. Casting and recasting them out of the troubling margins of the so-called conflict (spoilers, settlers, peacemakers, conversation stoppers, and repugnant others), this book seeks nothing less than to move the very ground of our moral imagination." --Gil Anidjar, author of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy