We often think of war as creating two different kinds of people: soldiers and civilians. But hasn't history taught us that this distinction is painfully nebulous? The contributors to this volume, writing from different disciplinary vantages, address a number of important issues connected to the ways in which the social distinctions and divisions surrounding war especially those that determine participation play out across different historical and geographical settings. Contextualizing the dichotomy of civilian and combatant against these larger complexities, this book offers a new understanding of the problematic middle ground that civilians occupy during wartime.