Short Abstract:

This panel explores how communities in war-torn environments in the Middle East and North Africa, navigate survival and repair. It examines resilient human and non-human collaborations, and highlights new practices of commoning amidst ecological and social devastation.

Long Abstract:

This panel examines the intersections of war, ecology, and commoning, focusing on how communities survive and repair life in war-torn environments. While war devastates ecosystems and displaces those reliant on shared resources, it also fosters resilient forms of collaboration between human and non-human actors that challenge the military’s view of landscapes of war. For many, war becomes an enduring environment of living, raising key questions: How do war ecologies reshape human-environment relations and inspire new practices of commoning?

Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa, this panel invites anthropologists to explore how communities negotiate their embedded ecologies. How do they resist militarized landscapes, asserting new forms of commoning amid environmental devastation? In what ways do these practices challenge state power, militarization, and post-war reconstruction?

We invite panellists to explore the “resistant ecologies” and “hazardous atmospheres” encompassing human, non-human and more-than-human relations that persist and make life resistant amidst relentless and enduring forces of military destruction. We aim to analyze the relations forged and cultivated across the fractured times and spaces of enduring war. Social life here grows in the ruptures and wreckage of structurally violent worlds, where militarized biospheres yield planetary ecological repercussions, exacerbating the effects of the climate crisis. Yet within the ruins, rubble and cracks, care and repair take place not only at the individual level but also in ways that shape ecologies and lead to fresh communal imaginations.

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