Ordinary Warfare and Militarized Landscapes

A Syllabus

Diana Pardo Pedraza

Description

War permeates and transforms familiar landscapes. The human-disturbed ground of the U.S. Pacific Northwest mountains, home to gourmet delicacies harvested by foragers as they recount war stories replete with trauma, survival, and healing. A museum exhibition in the Colombian capital, where personal artifacts, videos, photographs, maps, sound recordings, and texts tell stories of dispossession, pollution, and climate change amid a protracted war and ongoing efforts of political transition. The postoccupation Iraqi wetlands, whose existence or revitalization embodies national ecological aspirations entangled in transnational networks and geopolitical interests. The lively neighborhoods of contemporary Beirut, their spatial and material layout capture the ever-present specter of sectarian warfare and the growing logic of neoliberal urbanization. A small spa on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, where women care for and seek to remedy their skin, bearing the toxic consequences of the chemical war in Vietnam and the ambitious project of postwar restoration. Where does war unfold?

Communities heavily affected by never-ending wars have challenged the conventional notion of war as a discrete and contained event in time and space through their political activism and organizing efforts. Drawing on these communities’ lived experiences and valuable insights, contemporary feminist scholars from diverse interdisciplinary fields such as anthropology, geography, and history illuminate the inherent limitations of conceptualizing war solely as an eventful state.1 They emphasize the omnipresence of warlike relations and the effects of militarism and its associated technologies in everyday life.2 These effects persist even in contexts ostensibly labeled as periods of peace or postconflict.3 Seeing it as a condition, feminist scholars highlight the painful but ever-present marriage between war and the ordinary. The former’s ability to slip into and embed itself in the mundane is not a collateral effect, a dire but unforeseen consequence; rather, it is one of its constitutive attributes. Constantly changing forms and outlets, war “feels at home in the world,” finding a catalyst in “civilian” bodies, practices, landscapes, and infrastructures.4 Here, home does not mean, nor is it reduced to, the confines of private; it encompasses public spaces, from streets to deserts, from crop fields to wildlife refuges. Furthermore, the logics of militarization also envelop times of peace. A “landscaping project shaping material encounters far beyond the immediacy of war and counterinsurgency,” war has established itself on the landscape, materializing militarized views of peace that anticipate future conflicts.5 Nevertheless, for communities enduring and surviving under this violent political condition, war is not only a “system of society” that assimilates everything it touches, it becomes a place of life, a living environment.6

In a generative dialogue with these conceptual approaches, this syllabus explores the material, political, and affective legacies of political violence and militarization. It considers these issues by focusing on the ordinary landscapes of war and its aftermath. By ordinary, I mean the daily, mundane, and intimate actions and contours through which life is sustained, endured, and experienced. Inherently unstable and contingent, these actions and contours often go unnoticed because they are unremarkable, banal, and seemingly disconnected from transcendent values, including those that are often touted as the driving force behind military activities. However, they are crucial in the constitution, operation, and reproduction of spatial relations and practices of war and postwar. To be clear, more than a social reality, the latter—postwar—refers to official interpretations of the condition that supposedly follow peace agreements and the demobilization, demilitarization, and reconciliation processes.

Building upon contemporary academic concerns about the relationship between military logics and the environment, I bring together an interdisciplinary group of texts that addresses how spaces and their inhabitants, generally considered separate from battlefronts, are shaped by and shape the brutal and subtle, explicit and hidden, harmful and benign orders and presences of war. These militarized landscapes refer to the environment as a victim of war (although, as I explore below, they also go beyond such a conceptualization). Indeed, natural, rural, and urban areas are devastated by explosive and toxic warfare technologies and the presence of military actors and architecture. For instance, within the ongoing irregular war in Colombia, agricultural fields have been transformed into abandoned and barren lands by the uncertain threat of improvised landmines; the U.S. military’s tactical use of herbicides like Agent Orange in Vietnam during the 1960s defoliated forests, killed food crops, and left unknown potential toxic hot spots. As examined throughout the first unit, entitled “Ongoing Material Legacies of War,” this devastation transforms the socioecological and affective relationships between territories and their human and nonhuman inhabitants. While producing lingering and distributed environmental consequences, technologies of warfare destabilize conventional understandings of the times and spaces of war, making the analysis and representation of their aftermaths even more challenging.

However, the involvement of landscapes in war surpasses the shaping and devastation of the former by the latter—the relationship between them is more intricate, elusive, and obscure. The second unit of this syllabus, “Ordinary Ecologies of Militarism,” highlights the transformation of nature, urban infrastructures, and even domestic life into brutal technologies of governance aimed at historically marginalized and racialized communities. For example, the natural features of the Mediterranean Sea, the Rio Grande, and the Sonoran Desert have been weaponized to serve as natural deterrents to migration, resulting in death and disability, as well as the consolidation of well-organized violent economies of human trafficking. Under the logic of permanent or inevitable warfare, houses and cities are designed and built as highly surveilled fortresses capable of maintaining potential threats at bay. These natural and ordinary infrastructures render the principles and operations of war mundane and banal, while perpetuating the distinctions upon which such principles and operations are built, including exterior/interior, enemy/friend, risk/security, and violence/care. It is worth highlighting that these environments are also acutely intertwined with histories of colonialism, racism, capitalism, and self-devouring growth.

Finally, this syllabus is also interested in thinking critically about the natural and social environments that persist amid the ongoing violence of war, militarism, and racial capitalism, even if they are left painfully and forever scarred. The third unit, titled “(Post)conflict Environments,” looks at the ways in which war residues and landscapes have been managed and remedied by state agencies, as well as alternative modes of repairing and healing war-wounded ecologies. It also addresses the emergence of politically promising materializations of justice and care. What are the limits and possibilities of ecological, social, and political recovery and reconciliation?

This syllabus asks students to reflect on these multiple issues through the interdisciplinary lenses of feminist theory, environmental studies, and the anthropology of violence and peace in different global political contexts, such as Colombia, Bosnia, Iraq, Laos, Uganda, and the United States. Engaging with a comprehensive selection of readings and materials, students will identify and map keywords from the growing contemporary vocabulary around war-ecology relations, making connections and distinctions between these terms. In what follows, I offer a brief introduction to the conceptual or empirical questions for each week and the preliminary points of connection between the suggested readings. I also provide a visual prompt for each theme. These images and videos serve as stimuli to spark critical thinking and provide a starting point for exploring the main themes and concepts covered in the readings.

Keywords

Military geographies
Everyday militarisms
Ecologies of war
Military waste
Wastelands
Sacrificial land
Affective landscapes
Landscapes of suspicion
Warscapes
Coercive landscaping
Politics of securitization
Military environmentalism
Green wars
Environmental justice
Ecological reparation
Ecologies of resistance
Alongside violence

Unit 1: Ongoing Material Legacies of War

Week 1: Definitions—On Violence and the Ordinary

What does it mean to understand war and militarization not as extraordinary events that are circumscribed in time and space but as conditions with ambiguous limits that permeate and unfold in everyday life, in settings conventionally considered alien to the battlefield? During this first week, students will read authors who—informed by feminist theories but belonging to different social disciplines (philosophy, gender studies, anthropology, geography, and American studies)—draw attention to military violence that “happens outside of the borders of declared wars,” that “hides in plain sights,” in prosaic and banal places, and that is distributed in “networks of material, social, technological and technocratic relations.”7 These ordinary landscapes are not mere backgrounds of the war, nor are they only targets wrecked by the explosive and toxic brutality of armed conflict. This week’s texts invite students to ask how natural, rural, and urban landscapes vindicate, normalize, and reproduce martial logics and how their atmospheres, infrastructures, and configurations are “touched and moulded . . . by militarism and the activities of military forces” or by the low intensities of war that Diane M. Nelson analyzes.8

Cuomo, Chris J. “War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence.” Hypatia 11, no. 4 (1996): 30–45.
Guarasci, Bridget, and Eleana J. Kim. “Ecologies of War.” Fieldsights, January 25, 2022. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/ecologies-of-war.
Kaplan, Caren, Gabi Kirk, and Lea Tess. “Editors’ Letter. Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site.” Society and Space, March 8, 2020. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/editors-letter-everyday-militarisms-hidden-in-plain-sight-site.
Nelson, Diane M. “Low Intensities.” Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (2019): S122–33.
Woodward, Rachel. Military Geographies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), chap. 1.

Week 2: Explosive Legacies

This week focuses on one of the most recalcitrant material traces of war: explosive remnants. Offering geographic, ethnographic, and historical analyses that engage with theoretical frameworks as diverse as political ecology, new materialism, sound studies, and debates on precarity, this week’s authors explore the unwitting agencies, the lingering environmental and social impacts, the sonic aftermaths and the archival potential of military waste. Considering armed conflicts worldwide—from the mine-polluted continent of Africa, the Korean DMZ, the impoverished areas of postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, and remote villages in Laos—the authors show how the violence, uncertainty, and profitability of landmines exceed the economic rationale and military objectives of those who planted them. The agency of these devices also transcends the peace treaties and agreements that supposedly ended or at least suspended the wars that made them possible in the first place. Students will be compelled to question how explosive devices are critical in wartime as well as peacetime, how their volatile materiality and acoustic violence make them key players in the reconstitution of economies and societies, and how they actively intervene in the production of historical memory and the remaking of nature.

Henig, David. “Living on the Frontline: Indeterminacy, Value, and Military Waste in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Anthropological Quarterly 92, no. 1 (2019): 85–110.
Kim, Eleana. “Toward an Anthropology of Landmines: Rogue Infrastructure and Military Waste in the Korean DMZ.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 2 (2016): 162–87.
Oppong, Joseph R., and Ezekiel Kalipeni. “The Geography of Landmines and Implications for Health and Disease in Africa: A Political Ecology Approach.” Africa Today 52, no. 1 (2005): 3–25.
Sisavath, Davorn. “The US Secret War in Laos.” Radical History Review 2019, no. 133 (2019): 103–16.
Zani, Leah. Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), chap. 3.

Visual prompt: Elin o’Hara slavick, Bomb after Bomb: A Violent Cartography,http://www.elinoharaslavick.com/bomb-after-bomb-a-violent-cartography.html.
Keywords: U.S. military interventions, global bombing campaigns, sonic impacts, mapping technologies

Week 3: Toxic Atmospheres

Unlike the explosive violence of war, toxic military violence is often invisible, latent, and difficult to monitor, document, and address. Substances like uranium, depleted uranium (a by-product of nuclear waste), Agent Orange, petrochemicals, and burn-pit fumes produce immediate effects, killing and debilitating those directly exposed. However, they also spread silently through space and time, reaching other geographies and future generations. From different methodological and theoretical fields, this week’s authors discuss the historical, political, and social contexts in which military toxicity unfolds. They draw particular attention to the racial and geopolitical foundations in the extraction, deployment, and disposal of war chemicals and waste. This toxicity, they show, disproportionately affects certain bodies, landscapes, and ways of life, such as the lands and peoples of Navajo country, Iraq, Vietnam, and Lebanon. Furthermore, there is unequal public recognition, reparation, and mourning for those affected, rooted in colonial, imperial, and global capitalist ideologies that render certain populations and their lifeworlds extractable, killable, and pollutable—essentially treating them as wastelands.9 The authors reveal that the military’s toxic legacy extends beyond body counts and environmental contamination, permeating mundane, everyday practices like health-care systems already weakened by war, as well as women’s beauty and skincare practices.10 Inadvertently, it also forges and displaces “chemical kinship.”11

Dewachi, Omar. “The Toxicity of Everyday Survival in Iraq.” Jadaliyya, August 13, 2013. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/29295.
Touhouliotis, Vasiliki. “Weak Seed and a Poisoned Land.” Environmental Humanities 10, no. 1 (2018): 86–106.
Tu, Thuy Linh N. Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021), introduction, chap. 2.
Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), introduction.
Wool, Zoë. “All That Is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9, no. 1 (2023): https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38452.

Visual prompt: CBS Mornings, “How ‘Burn Pits’ in Iraq and Afghanistan May Have Put Veterans at Risk,” August 22, 2019, YouTube video, 7:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOk7iAiYCOw; TRT World, “Fallujah Birth Defects: A Toxic Remnant of the US Invasion of Iraq?,” September 1, 2020, YouTube video, 6:38, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETLZEoFn-lc.
Keywords: U.S. invasion, breathing fumes, toxic pollution and legacies, unequal distribution of harm, living with disabilities

Week 4: Affective Spaces of Violence

War not only creates explosive and toxic landscapes; it also has the power to imbue these landscapes and their inhabitants with affective intensities of panic, melancholy, love, and suspicion.

Attaching, circulating, and reverberating among spaces, bodies, and objects, such affects may contribute to the intensification of surveillance and the militarization of day-to-day life, fueled as they are by concerns about individual and collective survival, as well as the military supremacy of the nation-state.12 These affects can also be sources for memory-building, social reparation, and relationships of solidarity amid ongoing processes of uprooting, dispossession, and displacement. Looking at images of a nuclear-bombed United States, appropriated properties and objects in postwar Northern Cyprus, affective memories of Palestinian refugee women, and mine risk-management practices in rural Colombia, students will explore the political potential of the affective landscapes of war.

Berberich, C., N. Campbell, and R. Hudson. “Affective Landscapes: An Introduction.” Cultural Politics: An International Journal 9, no. 3 (2013): 313–22.
Masco, Joseph. “‘Survival Is Your Business’: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 361–98.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 1 (2009): 1–18.
Pardo Pedraza, Diana. “On Landmines and Suspicion: How (Not) to Walk Explosive.” Society and Space, March 9, 2020.
Salih, Ruba. “Bodies That Walk, Bodies That Talk, Bodies That Love: Palestinian Women Refugees, Affectivity, and the Politics of the Ordinary.” Antipode 49, no. 3 (2017): 742–60.

Visual prompt: Jo Ractliffe, artworks in the Walther Collection, available at https://www.walthercollection.com/en/collection/artists/jo-ractliffe.
Keywords: Angola and South Africa, barren terrains, material traces of war, atmospheres of abandonment and fear

Unit 2: Ordinary Ecologies of Militarism

Week 5: Weaponizing Nature

In previous weeks, students considered how landscapes and their inhabitants, including nonhumans, have been war casualties—how they have been violently occupied and reconfigured by explosive, toxic, and affective presences. This week, students will look at how nature has inspired and been mobilized by state and capital formations to wage war against racialized populations. In particular, they will examine how spaces like the Sonoran Desert and animals like dogs, bees, caterpillars, sheep, and beavers have been deliberately weaponized to stop undocumented migrants from crossing the U.S.–Mexico border, to discipline enslaved Black people, to intimidate activists fighting for civil rights and the environmental protection of Indigenous lands, to optimize the design of torture and battlefield techniques in the so-called war on terror, and to consolidate white supremacy through land concentration, racial purification, and nature modernization. As the authors illustrate, the entanglement of natural and animal life with warmaking reveals the ways in which logics of species, race, sexuality, and bodily capacity are central to the consolidation of contemporary nationalist and imperial formations.

Ahuja, Neel. “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar.” Social Text 29, no. 1 (106) (2011): 127–49.
Dicenta, Mara. “White Animals: Racializing Sheep and Beavers in the Argentinian Tierra Del Fuego.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 18, no. 2 (2023): 308–29.
Kosek, Jake. “Ecologies of Empire: On the New Uses of the Honeybee.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 650–78.
León, Jason de. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), introduction, part 1.
Yingling, Charlton, and Tyler Parry. “The Canine Terror.” Jacobin, May 19, 2016.

Visual prompt: “12 Ways Animals Have Helped the War Effort,” Imperial War Museum, https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/12-ways-animals-have-helped-the-war-effort.
Keywords: Twentieth-century and twenty-first-century wars, enlisted animals, transport, communication, companionship, militaristic rhetoric

Week 6: Urban Warscapes

How do political violence, security, and surveillance operate in the spaces of urban life? How do urban dwellers experience assemblages of police and military power? How are war and peace materialized in built infrastructures such as bridges, roads, walls, and waste-management systems? This week’s authors use the analysis of historical documents and vivid ethnographic descriptions to illustrate how modern warfare not only functions by degrading enemy infrastructure to cause slow death, destruction, and disruption, even for those not directly involved in the conflict. It also operates in transforming urban spaces into gray zones that fall “within the ambiguous spectrum between war and peace,” as well as in the strategic reconstruction of these spaces for a war that is already here or yet to come.13 Increasingly shaped by transnational securitization policies and neoliberal development investments, which unfold in anticipatory modes of danger and progress, these urban destruction and reconstruction processes expand the spaces understood to be in dispute and, therefore, must be secured. Even when it comes to postconflict reconstruction efforts, the materials used (e.g., concrete) and the infrastructures built (e.g., T-walls) reveal a militarized vision of peace.14 Through critical readings of urban spatial politics in Kenya, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and Colombia, students are invited to reflect on war as a landscaping project that infuses structural violence into construction.

Al-Bulushi, Samar. “Citizen-Suspect: Navigating Surveillance and Policing in Urban Kenya.” American Anthropologist 123, no. 4 (2021): 819–32.
Bou Akar, Hiba. For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018), preface, chap. 1.
Rubaii, Kali. “‘Concrete Soldiers’: T-Walls and Coercive Landscaping in Iraq.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no. 2 (2022): 357–62.
Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2019), introduction.
Zeiderman, Austin. “Concrete Peace: Building Security through Infrastructure in Colombia.” Anthropological Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2020): 497–528.

Visual prompt: “Conquer and Divide,” Forensic Architecture, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/conquer-and-divide; “Destruction and Return in Al-Araqib,” Forensic Architecture, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/destruction-and-return-in-al-araqib.
Keywords: Occupied Palestinian territories and neighborhoods, forced displacement and criminalization, technologies of fragmentation and erasure, evidence-making practices

Week 7: Home (In)securities

Interdisciplinary and feminist-oriented studies of war have drawn attention to how political violence, militarization, and militarism have infiltrated private spaces and intimate relationships and how the latter have shaped, sustained, and propagated the former. For example, conventional gender roles and imaginaries of family, sexuality, protection, and reproduction are underpinned by binary distinctions in warfare, such as public/private, domestic/foreign, civil/military, and care/violence. However, as this week’s authors poignantly illustrate, these distinctions are an artificially maintained illusion. The U.S. home front is constitutively imbued with military culture and war preparedness.15 In a post-9/11 context, motherhood appears to assume the role of the security state within the private domain of the family.16 The houses and yards of the Caribbean middle class are increasingly policed and becoming fortified spaces.17 The construction of Ugandan homes at the heart of international peace-building endeavors perpetuates racialized notions that fuel violent social relationships and uphold the erroneous separation between domestic violence and warfare.18 State-sponsored settlement and housing policy in Azerbaijan has become inextricably entwined with the military apparatus, fueling desires for heightened security measures and increased armament.19

Grewal, Inderpal. “‘Security Moms’ in the Early Twentieth-Century United States: The Gender of Security in Neoliberalism.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1/2 (2006): 25–39.
Ihar, Zsuzsanna. “Properties of War: The Militarization of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9, no. 1 (2023): https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39527.
Laliberté, Nicole. “‘Peace Begins at Home’: Geographic Imaginaries of Violence and Peacebuilding in Northern Uganda.” Political Geography 52, no. C (2016): 24–33.
Lutz, Catherine. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), introduction, chap. 6.
McKinson, Kimberley D. “Fortifying Home and Yard: Metal, Vegetation, and the Embodied Practice of Middle-Class In/Security in Jamaica.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2021): 297–323.

Visual prompt: Martha Rosler, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–1972, https://www.martharosler.net/house-beautiful.
Keywords: Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War, U.S. homes, gender politics, commodification, photomontages

Unit 3: (Post)conflict Environments

Week 8: War’s Ecological Havens

“Wildlife Is Thriving in Chernobyl,” read several newspaper and blog headlines during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic.20 The headline aimed to demonstrate that, like landscapes emptied of humans by nuclear accidents, natural life in rural and urban spaces would prosper due to public-health-related lockdowns. But what is the relationship between the environment and war (or infectious diseases) presumed in these statements? Can warfare be an ally of nature and conservation and sustainability policies? Students will critically engage with this question this week, exploring different readings of so-called military environmentalism. While Peter Coates observes that militarized landscapes have been areas for the unexpected survival of other-than-human nature, stressing the environmental threat posed by their demilitarization, Jeffrey Sasha Davis, Shiloh R. Krupar, and Bridget L. Guarasci criticize the celebration of biodiversity produced in spaces marked by war and the marketing of the military as an environmental protection agency.21 These authors contend that the representations of blasted landscapes as natural, pristine, wildness, or paradise are part of a long settler colonial history that reads populated landscapes as vacant or assesses habitation as harmful and invasive. Indeed, the “green projects” of ecotourism, conservation, and environmental recovery are sustained by violent exclusion, expropriation, and criminalization. “Green pretexts,” as Diana Ojeda calls them, have contributed to the increase and naturalization of militarization.22 They have also fueled ongoing debates about the untapped natural resources or potential economic profits in many of these supposedly protected areas.

Coates, Peter. “Borderland, No-Man’s Land, Nature’s Wonderland: Troubled Humanity and Untroubled Earth.” Environment and History 20, no. 4 (2014): 499–516.
Davis, Jeffrey Sasha. “Scales of Eden: Conservation and Pristine Devastation on Bikini Atoll.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 2 (2007): 213–35.
Guarasci, Bridget L. “The National Park: Reviving Eden in Iraq’s Marshes.” Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1 (2015): 128–53.
Krupar, Shiloh R. “Alien Still Life: Distilling the Toxic Logics of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 2 (2011): 268–90.
Ojeda, Diana. “Green Pretexts: Ecotourism, Neoliberal Conservation, and Land Grabbing in Tayrona National Natural Park, Colombia.” Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2 (2012): 357–75.

Visual prompt: Euronews, “The World’s Most Unlikely Nature Reserve: Wildlife Is Thriving in Chernobyl,” May 8, 2021, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XhKtvV_Pc0.
Keywords: Ukraine, nuclear power accidents, military environmentalism, human exceptionalism

Week 9: Ecological Demilitarization, Reparation, and Justice

How can we reckon with and repair the bodily, social, and ecological damage caused by warfare and its material and affective aftermath? How can these processes of accountability and restoration bring about comprehensive actualizations of justice? This week, students will confront the ecological, political, and ethical dilemmas that emerge in spaces marked materially and symbolically by the brutality of the plantation, the Mayan genocide, the explosive threat of landmines, a protracted armed conflict, and the war on drugs. Through the lenses of ethnography, feminist science and technology studies, and environmental humanities, this week’s authors reflect on the difficult path to demilitarization, reparation, and justice and the contradictions and ironies interwoven in states’ practices of equivalence and demands of evidence.23 Highlighting the limits of transitional and postwar justice, they also interrogate who counts as a victim and, therefore, who can be a subject of rights and justice, as the legal and political frameworks through which these issues have been considered so far are narrow and insufficient. Hence, they delve into generative conceptual distinctions around justice and transition: between reparation and repair, feeling-thinking and feeling-acting, monetary compensations and symbolic reparation, multicultural and ontological understanding of territorial harm and militarized and demilitarized disarmament.24

DeAngelo, Darcie. “Demilitarizing Disarmament with Mine Detection Rats.” Culture and Organization 24, no. 4 (2018): 285–302.
Lyons, Kristina. “Chemical Warfare in Colombia, Evidentiary Ecologies, and Senti-Actuando Practices of Justice.” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 3 (2018): 414–37.
Nelson, Diane. Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), chap. 0, 1, 3.
Ruiz-Serna, Daniel. When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022), chap. 7.
Thomas, Deborah A. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), coda.

Visual prompt: Ecological Reparation, YouTube videos, https://www.youtube.com/@EcologicalReparation/videos.
Keywords: Practices of remediation and resurgence, more-than-human ecologies, infrastructural repair, alternative cartographies, Colombia

Week 10: Landscapes of Survival and Care

How does one survive political violence, landscapes riddled by explosive remnants, authoritarian right-wing regimes, the slow deterioration of health-care infrastructures, and long-lasting experiences of trauma and displacement? In the previous weeks, students encountered numerous examples of the continuation of life amid the pervasiveness of war and militarization. In this final week, our focus lies expressly on the matter of survival, exploring the ethics of care in various forms. These include ordinary practices of survival alongside violence; radical acts of care through reciprocity, self-care, and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual; alliances with nonhuman entities and the cultivation of life-affirming pathways that challenge prevailing technologies of death; extended therapeutic geographies that reconfigure both institutional and communal modes of survival within and beyond conflict zones; and the power of storytelling and the preservation of war memories that encapsulate unique understandings of freedom in global blasted landscapes.25 For example, Black women in the Colombian Pacific have managed to endure the hardships of war, economic inequality, and gender-based violence through daily acts of redistribution, solidarity, and collective care.26 In contexts characterized by long-term armed conflict and governmental neglect, such as Iraq, people persist by charting and traversing regional connections and alternative health-care systems.27

Dewachi, Omar, Anthony Rizk, and Neil V. Singh. “(Dis)Connectivities in Wartime: The Therapeutic Geographies of Iraqi Healthcare-Seeking in Lebanon.” Global Public Health 13, no. 3 (2018): 288–97.
Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Tamara Kneese. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 1–16.
Khayyat, Munira. A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), chap. 4.
Lizarazo, Tania. “Alongside Violence: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2018): 175–96.
Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), chap. 6.

Visual prompt: Collaborative project facilitated by Tania Lizarazo, Mujeres Pacíficas, http://www.mujerespacificas.org/.
Keywords: Chocó-Colombia, Black communities, survival as a performance, feminist political practice, digital storytelling

Diana Pardo Pedraza is an anthropologist interested in exploring (de)militarized landscapes, postconflict environmental politics, and multispecies relations of aid and care. She is assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow (2023–2024). Her book manuscript “Landscapes of Suspicion: Minefields, Peace Laboratories, and the Ecologies of (Post)War in Colombia” is an ethnography of humanitarian efforts to clear territories occupied by improvised landmines amid ongoing war and processes of peace and reconciliation. She has published in numerous journals, including American Ethnologist, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Current Anthropology, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Her work is also forthcoming in Environmental Humanities.

Notes

1. Carl Clausewitz, On War (London: Penguin, 1982).
2. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007); Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004); Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
3. Diane Nelson, “Reckoning the After/Math of War in Guatemala,” Anthropological Theory 10, no. 1–2 (2010): 87–95, https://doi.org/10/bv75f8; Carlota McAllister and Diane Nelson, eds., War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013); Eloísa Berman-Arévalo and Diana Ojeda, “Ordinary Geographies: Care, Violence, and Agrarian Extractivism in ‘Post-Conflict’ Colombia,” Antipode 52, no. 6 (2020): 1,583–602, https://doi.org/10/gh7bzv.
4. Diana Pardo Pedraza, Xan Sarah Chacko, Jennifer Terry, and Astrida Neimanis, “Introduction: Domestication of War,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9, no. 1 (2023): 3.
5. Kali Rubaii, “‘Concrete Soldiers’: T-Walls and Coercive Landscaping in Iraq,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no. 2 (2022): 357, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743822000435; Rachel Woodward, Military Geographies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
6. Julian Reid, “Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault,” Social Text 24, no. 1 (86) (2006): 127–52, https://doi.org/10/cbgvjv; Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, vol. 3 (New York: Picador, 2003); Munira Khayyat, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).
7. Chris J. Cuomo, “War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia 11, no. 4 (1996): 30; Caren Kaplan, Gabi Kirk, and Lea Tess, “Editors’ Letter. Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site,” Society and Space, March 8, 2020, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/editors-letter-everyday-militarisms-hidden-in-plain-sight-site; Bridget L. Guarasci and Eleana Kim, “Introduction: Ecologies of War,” Fieldsights, January 25, 2022, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/ecologies-of-war.
8. Woodward, Military Geographies, 3; Diane M. Nelson, “Low Intensities,” Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (2019): 122–33.
9. Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
10. Omar Dewachi, “The Toxicity of Everyday Survival in Iraq,” Jadaliyya, August 13, 2013, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/29295; Thuy Linh N. Tu, Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021).
11. Zoë Wool, “All That Is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9, no. 1 (2023): https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38452.
12. C. Berberich, N. Campbell, and R. Hudson, “Affective Landscapes: An Introduction,” Cultural Politics: An International Journal 9, no. 3 (2013): 313–22; Diana Pardo Pedraza, “On Landmines and Suspicion: How (Not) to Walk Explosive Fields,” Society and Space, March 9, 2020; Joseph Masco, “‘Survival Is Your Business’: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 361–98.
13. Samar Al-Bulushi, “Citizen-Suspect: Navigating Surveillance and Policing in Urban Kenya,” American Anthropologist 123, no. 4 (2021): 820; Hiba Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018).
14. Austin Zeiderman, “Concrete Peace: Building Security through Infrastructure in Colombia,” Anthropological Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2020): 497–528; Rubaii, “‘Concrete Soldiers.’”
15. Lutz, Homefront.
16. Inderpal Grewal, “‘Security Moms’ in the Early Twentieth-Century United States: The Gender of Security in Neoliberalism,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1/2 (2006): 25–39.
17. Kimberley D. McKinson, “Fortifying Home and Yard: Metal, Vegetation, and the Embodied Practice of Middle-Class In/Security in Jamaica,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2021): 297–323.
18. Nicole Laliberté, “‘Peace Begins at Home’: Geographic Imaginaries of Violence and Peacebuilding in Northern Uganda,” Political Geography 52, C (2016): 24–33.
19. Zsuzsanna Ihar, “Properties of War: The Militarization of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9, no. 1 (2023): https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39527.
20. Victoria Gill, “Coronavirus: Wildlife Scientists Examine the Great ‘Human Pause,’” BBC News, June 22, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53113896; Robyn White, “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Has Become Haven for Endangered Eagles, Study Finds,” Newsweek, January 20, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/chernobyl-haven-endangered-eagles-exclusion-zone-1671163.
21. Peter Coates, “Borderland, No-Man’s Land, Nature’s Wonderland: Troubled Humanity and Untroubled Earth,” Environment and History 20, no. 4 (2014): 499–516; Jeffrey Sasha Davis, “Scales of Eden: Conservation and Pristine Devastation on Bikini Atoll,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 2 (2007): 213–35; Shiloh R. Krupar, “Alien Still Life: Distilling the Toxic Logics of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 2 (2011): 268–90; Bridget L. Guarasci, “The National Park: Reviving Eden in Iraq’s Marshes,” Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1 (2015): 128–53.
22. Diana Ojeda, “Green Pretexts: Ecotourism, Neoliberal Conservation, and Land Grabbing in Tayrona National Natural Park, Colombia,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2 (2012): 357–75.
23. Diane Nelson, Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); Kristina Lyons, “Chemical Warfare in Colombia, Evidentiary Ecologies, and Senti-Actuando Practices of Justice,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 3 (2018): 414–37.
24. Deborah A. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019); Lyons, “Chemical Warfare in Colombia”; Nelson, Who Counts?; Daniel Ruiz-Serna, When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022); Darcie DeAngelo, “Demilitarizing Disarmament with Mine Detection Rats,” Culture and Organization 24, no. 4 (2018): 285–302.
25. Tania Lizarazo, “Alongside Violence: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2018): 175–96; Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 1–16; Khayyat, Landscape of War; Omar Dewachi, Anthony Rizk, and Neil V. Singh, “(Dis)Connectivities in Wartime: The Therapeutic Geographies of Iraqi Healthcare–Seeking in Lebanon,” Global Public Health 13, no. 3 (2018): 288–97; Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).
26. Lizarazo, “Alongside Violence.”
27. Dewachi, Rizk, and Singh, “(Dis)Connectivities in Wartime.”

Syllabus