Book Launch - Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. A legal and medical anthropologist who studies, teaches and writes about violence and security, she is the author of three books, including multiple award-winning ethnography, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018) and Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (April 2024). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Fulbright Program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, among others. In addition to academic journals, such as American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Jusionyte has written for The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian, and discussed her research broadly in the media, including on BBC and NPR. Jusionyte is the editor of the California Series in Public Anthropology, and she is a member of the Advisory Committee of Global Action on Gun Violence and the Research Network to Prevent Gun Violence in the Americas. 

More information about Dr. Jusionyte can be found here. 

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico.

An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, Exit Wounds expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border.