Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the economic and social after life of war debris, and how recycling and profitability are functionally integrated with war and destruction, unregulated border trade, and the booming reconstruction sector in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, the steel-manufacturing industry has considerably emerged in Iraqi Kurdistan in parallel with the expansion of war and destruction in the region. This paper focuses on the cycle of war scrap from destruction to reconstruction. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork in a private steel mill in the south-west of Erbil, ten miles away from the ISIS-Iraqi Kurdistan war front, and along the chain of scrap metal trade between Mosul and Erbil between November 2014 and February 2016, the paper explores the economic and social after life of war debris, and how recycling and profitability are functionally integrated with war and destruction, unregulated border trade, and the booming reconstruction sector in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. How are war and destruction articulated and functionally integrated with the expansion of industrial production? How are informal economic activities developed to meet a certain need of the formal economic activities? How are the steel-manufacturing sector and scrap metal trade benefiting from Iraqi Kurdistan's quasi-state form? In what ways are the ideologies of war and Kurdish independence interwoven to become a motivating force behind the steel production and business? What are the institutions assisting the expansion of the steel business and enabling the global circulation of its profit? How do moralities, ethics, and corruption discourses reproduce and come to contradict with contemporary steel recycling in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq?

Paper short abstract:

Looking at the conjuncture between the search for 'Armenian' treasures and the war of the Turkish state against the Kurdish movement, this paper engages with the longue durée of 'war' as a means of governance and dispossession.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation enquires into the temporal and material entanglements of different chapters in the history of war economy in the region of Eastern Turkey. Emerging from ethnographic fieldwork, it will pick up different stories attesting to the significance of the war between the Turkish state's army and the armed wing of the Kurdish movement (PKK) for the practice of hunting for what are mostly referred to as 'Armenian' treasures or gold. These entanglements point not only to a structural feature of war as a regressive institution that makes possible new intimacies with death and opens up new spaces of accumulation and dispossession. They also reveal an economic afterlife of World War I and the particular role that the Armenian genocide has played for the constitution of Turkey's national economy through the dispossession of Armenian property. The presentation will focus in particular on the history of emergency governance through such legal frameworks as 'state of siege' and (later) 'state of exception', which have been crucial in institutionalising 'war' as a primary mode of relating to and governing differently constituted 'minorities'. The legal framework, however, has not only enabled a necropolitical targeting of the lives of these 'minorities', but has also made way to the expropriation of property. My contribution thus wishes to highlight the question of historicity, temporal entanglements and periodisation as central to the overall concerns of the panel.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the Bosnian conflict scenario and covers the persisting rhetoric of humanitarianism that underpins post-war financialization and dispossession in the country.

Paper long abstract:

Mary Kaldor defined the conflict in Bosnia an archetype of global war in which, the fragmentation of political and military power on ethno-nationalist basis, has generated a low intensity warfare with destructive power over local material assets and social networks. Warfare has also reshaped everyday economy on the basis of global humanitarianism and foreign aid that had been increasingly financialized in the conflict aftermath. Donations which flew into the country at multiple levels (state and sub-state institutions, municipalities, etc..) had been replaced by loans provided by multilateral financial institutions and by foreign commercial banks that took control of the credit market in the country. In this scenario of peripheral financialization, financial institutions offer temporary solutions to an "enduring economic emergency" caused mainly by the destruction and the uncertain privatization of the productive system. At a micro level, the paper will look into persisting humanitarian narratives that foster the structuring of the post-war credit system to "help" the local population bearing the social and material costs of a "privatized reconstruction". It will also cover the humanitarian rhetoric underpinning the planning and selling of consumer credits products by financial institution in fact profiting from "private help" (social collateral - guarantors- and collateralization of remittances). Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper will highlight how post war financialization and dispossession are supported by a market-based humanitarianism proliferating from deregulation, from intersections between formal and informal dynamics and from the twist between micro and macro over indebtedness in the country.

Paper short abstract:

While scholarship on violent leaders has focused a lot on established violent leaders, this paper looks at the everyday practices of Indian village 'bosses' in the process of establishment to gain a better understanding of how exactly economic, political and social domains relate at the interface.

Paper long abstract:

Recent scholarship on wars, conflicts and violence has described different modalities of 'shadow governance' - governance in which no clear distinctions can be made between legal, illegal, legitimate, illegitimate, public and private. At the same time, anthropology has begun to study perpetrators rather than only the victims of violence and the ways in which violent perpetrators navigate a series of intimately entangled social, political, economic and criminal domains. Much of this scholarship, also in South Asia, has however focused on established violent leaders, who occupy powerful positions both within political parties and international criminal/economic networks. Violence, both performative and nakedly instrumental, serves to preserve existing spheres of influence. Exploring the everyday practices of local 'bosses' in rural South India, I turn my attention in this paper to those bosses that are not yet established. I ask how local bosses establish control over economic resources when they do not have significant political power? How do they make possible political careers in lack of money? And how freely can they use violence when they cannot use financial resources to fund a public image of a good, generous man? How do transgressing the lines between private, public, legal and illegal empower and energize bosses in becoming? By looking into the everyday practices of local bosses in their aspirations to power, I aim to better understand how, at the interface, economic, political and social domains of power enable one another, and finally, how power in conflict and violence is established and reestablished.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a case study from the urban margins of Istanbul, the paper examines the enduring legacy of Cold War counterinsurgency warfare in refashioning dissent against the state. It illustrates the links between counterinsurgency and civilian violence.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on a case study from the urban margins of Istanbul, and illustrating the role played by the RAND cooperation (American counterinsurgency think thank) in crafting new warfare paradigms to suppress the allignment of leftwing and pro-Kurdish dissent in Turkey, my paper examines the legacy of Cold War counterinsurgency warfare in refashioning dissent against the state. The growing literature on the enduring legacies of the Cold War counterinsurgency techniques mainly underlines the pacification effect of counterinsurgency and does not focus on the low-intensity conflict doctrine. I show the ways in which the low-intensity conflict doctrine, which played a crucial role in provoking counterviolence in the Cold War era, still informs counterinsurgency attempts of bottom-up reconstruction of dissident forces in a way to counter existing and/or prevent emerging forms of alignments among dissident populations. Ultimately, I illustrate the links between counterinsurgency and civilian violence from the vantage point of counterinsurgency's productive concern not merely with "suppressing the enemy," but also with fundamentally shaping it and its relation to society.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses discourses and imageries of the continuation of genocide and the politics of ethnic cleansing in the area of Podrinje in Eastern Bosnia and underlines the interconnections between warfare and economic and political fields in times of war and peace.

Paper long abstract:

Bosnian war (1992-1995) broke out as part of the larger process of the disintegration of the SFRY. The politics of ethnic cleansing was used as part of the general warfare strategy in the 1990s conflict spilling the violence from place to place in the newly emerging nation-states of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Ultimately, it was the ethnic cleansing, which made the delineation of the new nation-states possible and formed the nowadays borders. In the area of Podrinje in Eastern Bosnia, the politics of ethnic cleansing was executed mainly by the Bosnian Serb Army and aimed against all non-Serb inhabitants (namely the population of the Muslim origin).

Even though, the year 2020 marks twenty-five years since the Srebrenica genocide and the end of the war in BiH, in local public and academic discourses the idea of a certain continuation of genocide and ethnic cleansing persists. In particular, the entity of Republika Srpska is seen by some as a direct result of ethnic cleansing and the legitimization and continuation of the war politics in the peace time. This presentation discusses discourses and imageries of the continuation of war, genocide and the politics of ethnic cleansing in the area of Podrinje in Eastern Bosnia, namely the Srebrenica municipality, where I have conducted a longterm ethnographic research. On this particular example, I also aim to illustrate the interconnections between warfare and economic and political fields in times of war and peace.

Paper short abstract:

Since the Cold War's end, war finance and supply have become reminiscent of early-modern warmaking. This presentation introduces a future study of the daily lives of quartermasters in the army of the Holy Roman Empire during the 30 Years War.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation introduces a future book project exploring the daily lives of minor officers responsible for supply and finance in the Imperial army during the 30 Years War (1618-1648).

War has frequently resisted geographical confinement, especially the pan-European conflicts of the early seventeenth century. Early-modern European fiscal-military states relied on the interaction of state and non-state actors to raise money and resources, and to promulgate war. Complex networks of supply and finance crossed borders of state, region, religion, and language. While the boundaries between formal/informal or public/private now seem to be breaking down, then they did not yet exist.

Existing explorations of the military economies of the 30 Years War focus on the administrative level. In contrast I propose a social history of military finance and transport, focusing on minor officers like quartermasters and fouriers. This analysis will explore their interactions with common soldiers, their own administrations, and local civilians. I will also explore their interactions with their physical environment.

I will also address continuity and change in low-level Imperial military finance throughout the 30 Years War. Discussions of war finance in the Empire either begin or end with administrative reorganizations and political developments in the mid-1630s. In contrast I plan to study the entire war, using this longer perspective to problematize the effects of these events on the daily practice of supplying and housing troops in the field.

This presentation will invite feedback on areas like the location of primary sources or comparisons with other periods.