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Paper Short Abstract:

How do people live their lives in landscapes and soil that are contaminated with lethal wastes of war? This paper i) develops the notion of 'guerrilla demining’ as a material and ethical practice of ‘freeing the soil’, and ii) explores its relationship to political practices of freedom.

Paper Abstract:

Wars create and leave behind ‘deadly environments’ (Henig 2020) contaminated with radioactive, toxic, explosive remains, thereby violently reconfiguring relations between people and the natural elements such as the air, soil, and water. These wastes of war thus engender new biosocial, geosocial, and chemosocial entanglements and practices. Drawing on my long-term research of explosive war remnants (landmines) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I ask how people live their lives in landscapes and soil that are contaminated with lethal wastes of war, and in a situation in which humanitarian demining efforts have been largely halted.

In this presentation, I follow several individuals who have engaged in what I term ‘guerrilla demining’ – grassroots, unsystematic but sustained efforts to monitor contamination and clear explosive war remains from the soil that are beyond the purview of the state. Guerrilla demining requires a deep localised knowledge of the soil and the terrain, of the explosives, as much as a deep sense of care with regard to making life possible in deadly environments. Following the panel’s call, I will reflect on the relationship between ‘guerrilla demining’ as transformative practices of ‘freeing the soil’ and political practices of freedom for those who are engaged in these activities. In conclusion, I will speculate in the spirit of David Greaber’s anarchist anthropology: If there is ‘no escaping the toxic world’ (Nading 2020, 209), can acts of ‘freeing the soil’ become generative for ‘acting as if one is already free’ (Graeber)?