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Contribution short abstract

This paper asks how people (re)inhabit war-disturbed environments. It focuses on human-soil disturbances caused by explosive war remains contamination. Following various forms of 'guerilla demining' activities, it shows how these constitute a world-making practice of elemental infrapolitics.

Contribution long abstract

This paper asks how people (re)inhabit war-disturbed environments. Wars create and leave behind ‘deadly environments’ (Henig 2020) contaminated with radioactive, toxic, explosive remains and discard, thereby violently reconfiguring relations between people and the natural elements such as air, soil, and water. Drawing on fieldwork in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which humanitarian demining efforts have been largely halted, I move my ethnographic gaze ‘down to earth’ to elucidate geosocial relations between people and soil that is contaminated by explosive war remains, and landmines in particular. I follow several individuals - a hunter, a trickster, a carer, and a forensic expert - who have been engaged in acts of ‘guerrilla demining’. This notion refers to grassroots, often illegal, idiosyncratic but sustained activities of monitoring the contamination, and clearing explosive war remains from the soil, be it in the fields, pastures, forest, or mass graves. Since these acts take place beyond the purview of the state and of the international humanitarian demining organisations, I consider guerrilla demining as a form of infrapolitics (after James Scott). While guerrilla demining requires a deep localised knowledge of the soil (and sometimes of the fire), the terrain, and the explosives, it is more than a survival tactic. It is also pursued out of a deep sense of geosocial care for the soil, the livestock, the living, and the dead. What thus emerges from ‘the accumulation of thousands … of such small acts [of care]’ (Scott 2012), I argue, is a world-making practice of elemental infrapolitics.