Younes Saramifar is an anthropologist who begins with the mundane and ends up in the strangest corners of human existence. Somewhere between an AK-47 and Vodka shots that Islamists joke about, Sufi prayer beads, and war photographs nobody wants to look at, he found an interdisciplinary approach to the Political Anthropology of Domination—how dominants tell political stories and the dynamics that reproduce domination.

He has one PhD in Cultural Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics and a second PhD (cum laude) in Cultural Anthropology from VU Amsterdam. He has done fieldwork where ethnography rarely happens—training camps in Lebanon, combat zones in Iraq, and borderlands of Iran and Afghanistan. By focusing on human-nonhuman relationships within memory and histories of inequalities and violence, he questions how images, bodies, and objects get recruited into stories and worldmaking about who deserves to rule.

His latest book is The Promise of Violence (2026), which has been called "caring and courageous ethnographical endeavor", "a dazzling and intellectually fearless book," and "a captivating read". His articles have appeared in journals such as Social Anthropology, Material Religion, Journal of Material Culture, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Middle East Journal, and Ethnos, which most people will never read at the beach.