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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?