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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.’

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The aim of this presentation is to show how, through a process of inquiry, the inhabitants of Baghdad acquire knowledge about the toxicity that surrounds them and incorporate know-how to protect themselves and live with a degraded environment.

Paper long abstract:

A few years ago, the Iraqi government announced that Baghdad was entering a new era of prosperity and attractiveness. Its stated ambition is to mark a break with the past. As it likes to suggest, the days of conflict and urban destruction are over. But while the city's modernist turn has been signaled to the world by large-scale projects, the ecological consequences of the wars that hit the city have not disappeared. Tons of waste from the American occupation, fighting and destruction contaminate the soil and water. The air, meanwhile, is saturated with the fumes of endless oil extraction and burning garbage.

Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the city of Baghdad between 2023 and 2024, this presentation highlights how residents manage to cope everyday with a degraded environment. This anthropology of the sensitive experience of the city considers the troubles linked to visible and invisible pollution as the starting point of an inquiry led by the inhabitants in order to identify the causes, test the solutions and more generally problematize their situation, enabling them to re-establish, sometimes, a continuity in the conduct of their activities. A detailed description of the knowledge acquired by residents about toxicity, and the know-how incorporated to protect themselves from it, will enable us to draw up the modalities by which transactions with an environment take place.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates acute particulate air pollution in Iğdır, strategically positioned at the easternmost tip of Türkiye, neighboring Mount Ararat, and bordering Armenia, Iran, and the Azerbaijani Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates acute particulate air pollution in Iğdır, strategically positioned at the easternmost tip of Türkiye, neighboring Mount Ararat, and bordering Armenia, Iran, and the Azerbaijani Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan. The town, identified as Europe's most polluted city in the 2021 World Air Quality Report, is grappling with severe particulate pollution in the air, causing significant respiratory and lung diseases. Residents, who have been wearing masks regularly long before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, are now calling for the town's relocation to a less polluted region in the south. Despite the absence of confirmed nuclear radioactive emissions, the Metsamor nuclear power plant, situated across the Armenian border, is perceived as a pollutant source, raising concerns about its role in harming the health of residents and potentially necessitating the displacement of the nearby border town. These concerns are contextualized within the broader geopolitical tensions, specifically the second Armenian-Azerbaijan war of 2020 and the ongoing conflict regarding the strategic Zangezur corridor in Nagorno-Karabakh, which seeks to link Türkiye, Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, and Azerbaijan. Following the discourse on air pollution in the town as an ethnographic case, this paper investigates the formulation and dissolution of particulate pollution in the air as a contentious social work within the context of situated knowledge making. It argues that the confluence of wartime mistrust, cosmologies of forced displacement, and scientific narratives coalesce into shared, radical imaginaries that facilitate public engagement in building and un-building of international borders permeated by the transboundary movement of contaminants.

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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.

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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.

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This paper engages with the concept of 'infrastructural violence' in Palestine, arguing that that lack of access to infrastructure is a form of violence inflicted on people and environment, experienced through multiple scales, forms, sites and temporalities of infrastructural absence.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I reflect on dialectic relations with infrastructure in all its complexity. In Palestine, emphasis has been concentrated on imperial and colonial infrastructures and how they dispose and eliminate indigenous presence, normalise denial to that infrastructure (through laws and physical destruction) and construct a lingering 'toxic biosphere of war' as coined by Ghassan Abu Sitta and Mark Zeitoun in the besieged Gaza Strip. The paper will explore the multiple ways in which Palestinians engage with infrastructures; their aspirations and promises but also refusals – as they get built, destroyed, rebuilt, disrupted and reappropriated.

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Tripoli, Lebanon is considered the most impoverished city on the Mediterranean. To evoke images of past prosperities, inhabitants refer to orange orchards and the sea, two ecological features that are quickly diminishing. The paper discusses political futures in the wake of such ecological losses.

Paper long abstract:

Once a bustling economic hub, Tripoli, Lebanon is now considered the most impoverished city on the Mediterranean. Ravaged by civil conflict and systemic divestment, Tripoli now stands at the margins of political power, a city undergirded by atmospheres of desertedness, incompletion and the constant possibility of violence. To find respite from the daily reminders of living in this ever-present state of decline, inhabitants of Tripoli (Trabulsis) evoke memories of two ecological features – orange orchards and the sea – that offer possibilities of alternative future-making, uncorrupted by present constraints.

Today, Tripoli’s orange orchards are sites of aggressive real-estate developments led by kleptocrats who are transforming the seafront into exclusive restaurants and residences, inaccessible to the wider public. The sea on the other hand, has, since the economic crisis of 2019, turned into a container of drowned lives, journeys to better lands cut short by a combination of new human trafficking organizations and increased maritime securitization. In my contribution, I examine how Trabulsis navigate the ecological and material ruins of their pasts as protracted ‘’senses of ending’’ made possible by structural conditions and the loss of ecological spaces, the latter which have allowed them and their ancestors before them to articulate versions of fruitful and abundant futures. In response to this, I focus on two divergent trajectories that relieve Trabulsis from their senses of ending – participating in armed conflict and joining the 2019 secular Uprising that aimed at creating new ecological connections to their now heavily urbanized spaces.

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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.