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 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.’