Corinne Dufka’s This Is War: Photographs from a Decade of Conflict gathers work made between 1988 and 1999, when she reported on wars, revolutions, coups, separatist struggles, and mass atrocities across nine countries and three continents. Published in 2023, the book begins in Cold War-era El Salvador, continues through Bosnia, and then turns to conflicts in Rwanda, South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia, and the Congo.

That progression gives the photographs more than geographic breadth. It places distinct crises within a late-twentieth-century continuum of political violence, moving from battlefield events to the consequences borne by civilians and combatants. Dufka’s pictures confront damaged bodies, bereavement, displacement, and the misuse of power, yet they also register resistance and human attachment. Their force lies in this unsettled balance: brutality is neither softened nor isolated from tenderness, dignity, and survival.

Dufka later left photojournalism for work as a war-crimes investigator, a biographical turn that sharpens the book’s concern with responsibility and historical record. The photographs preserve evidence from conflicts that did not always receive sustained international attention, while asking how violence continues long after a news cycle has moved elsewhere. They also document the position of a woman working within late-twentieth-century conflict photography, without allowing professional biography to eclipse the people represented.

At 256 pages, the hardcover provides space for a substantial cross-conflict account rather than a narrowly bounded report from one war. For collectors of documentary photography and photojournalism, its importance rests in the conjunction of range, chronology, and ethical focus: one photographer’s sustained record of an era, organized to expose both recurring structures of violence and the particular lives caught within them. It is a demanding book whose value lies not in spectacle, but in the duration and seriousness of its looking.