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- Convenors:
-
Sana Chavoshian
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
Munira Khayyat (New York University Abu Dhabi)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 203
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel welcomes proposals that engage with the ways that life is waged in places of enduring war and sanctions. Drawing on ethnographic work from Middle Eastern war-zones, we bring ethnographic detail into conversation with current anthropological debates around war and the Anthropocene.
Long Abstract:
For many on this earth, war is an environment of living. This panel seeks to rethink war from the worlds in which it is lived, shifting our thinking from explosive violence to enduring contamination, from deadly processes to practices of care and survival, from event to environment. This panel delves into the ecological dimensions of wars and sanctions, exploring life-making practices that are forged in the midst of enduring conflicts and devastating economic sanctions. Thus, we invite panelists to explore the “resistant ecologies” and “hazardous atmospheres” encompassing human, non-human and more-than-human relations that persist and make resistant life amidst relentless and enduring forces of military destruction. Drawing on ethnographic work from Middle Eastern war-zones, we seek to bring ethnographic detail and insight into conversation with current anthropological debates around war and the Anthropocene.
We approach contemporary war environments as exposed to state interventions and reshuffled in emergent political formations. Here, we explore nodes of “doing” with atmospheric, toxic and military quasi-objects that elude particular habitual knowledge and sensory practices. We aim at analyzing 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 effects.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper traces out the explosion of dust in the Iranian geopolitics. It explores ethnographically how the political dynamics of sanctions and intensive militarization interact with aerosols and change the everyday life of people in South-West border province of Khuzestan.
Paper long abstract:
Following the 2012 international sanctions that cut the Iranian economy off from the global markets, the face of Khuzestan, the province of oil towers and refineries on the border of Iran and Iraq and laid upon Shatt al-Arab, changed drastically. This paper traces out the explosion of dust into Iranian politics as a conundrum of how the political dynamics of sanctions and intensified militarization interact with aerosols. In the past years, the dust-wind whose yellowish haze have expanded over the Iran-Iraq borders, have reconfigured Iran’s biopolitics as well as its trans-local environmental governance. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the dust-winds as atmospheric phenomena that carry, invoke and furnish experiences of regional war and international economic sanctions. Recent anthropologies of war have unsettled the spatial and temporal demarcation of battlefields. While attuned to the atmospheric endangerment, I complement these studies by showing the embroilment of the political and meteorological issues as they compose a repertoire of atmospheric trespasses and render atmosphere explicit in the experience of ‘life in the air.’
Paper short abstract:
The isolating sanctions regime against Iran is examined ethnographically in Mahshahr Petro-harbour. I explore how this pervasive sense of "standing alone" nurtures a necropolitics, prompting that as we are excluded from the world, we possess the exclusive right to pollute the planet.
Paper long abstract:
“Having been through the highs and lows of the Iran-Iraq war, let me be clear, coping with US sanctions today feels way more challenging than those eight years of conflict … No country willingly sacrifices itself by subjecting to the threat of buying oil from us... we stand alone.” remarked, Bijan Zangeneh, the old technocrat and the former Iranian minister of petroleum, In a 2019 interview.
This study delves into how the temporal urgency created by sanctions in Iran has played a role in sea pollution in Mahshahr, a petrochemical harbour along the Persian Gulf. Over the last two decades, substantial streams of industrial waste have been discharged into the aquatic environment of this area, profoundly impacting both the marine life and the local population. Official authorities have either concealed this issue or made public promises to address it. However, behind closed doors, there is a belief, expressed by the CEO of one petrochemical plant, that “we are not luxurious enough to think about the sea. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
The sanctions regime aimed at isolating Iran from the global economy and community is examined in this study. I explore how this pervasive sense of "standing alone" nurtures a necropolitics, invoking the sense that as we are excluded from the world, we possess the exclusive right to pollute the planet. My focus centres on industrial technocrats, exploring how they interpret sanctions as a justification for this perceived right and examining their responses to public protests.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines life in South Lebanon where resistant ecologies thrive amid perennial gusts of war. In frontline villages, armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered landmines have become the conditions within which everyday life is waged.
Paper long abstract:
What worlds take root in war? This paper takes us to the southern border of Lebanon where resistant ecologies thrive amid perennial gusts of war. In frontline villages, armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered landmines have become the conditions within which everyday life is waged. Here, multi-species partnerships such as tobacco-farming and goat-herding carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these survival collectives make life possible within an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. Like other unlivable worlds of the Anthropocene, war is a place where life must go on.
Paper short abstract:
Providing a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation,’ we trace stateless Syrians' resistance, and ask: why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel?
Paper long abstract:
The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This presentation provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, we discuss the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region, exploring in ethnographic detail the continuity and the near-impossibility of its peoples' resistance.