Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Allelopathic non/assemblages refer to the negative ways that plants, humans and the four elements open way for broader coexistence. Experiments with mulching, and “flora fortresses” to restore soils turns allelopathy into practical, adaptive strategies that merge science, myth, and local knowledge.

Paper long abstract

Had Social Darwinism drawn its metaphors from Mendel’s chickpea garden, it might have been named allelopathy, a biochemical, plant-based understanding of competition, conquest, and survival among vegetal and elemental beings. Long surrounded by myths, conspiracies, and popular misinterpretations, allelopathy is refashioned in social media gardening tips, prescribing which plants should not be grown together, often without empirical grounding. How then, does allelopathy, despite the difficulty of disentangling the effects of allelochemicals from light, water, soil, and microbial dynamics, turn into an experimental practice among farmers and conservationists navigating uncertainty in war-degraded landscapes of the Iran–Iraq southern borderlands?

This paper explores ethnographically practices of soil-conservation among farmers and engineers in the deserted parts of Mesopotamian Marshland that evolve around multi-layered planting, mulching, and the construction of “flora fortresses” to revive war-impoverished soils and rotate crops. These practices unfold in landscapes degraded by heavy-metal pollution, unexploded ordnance, erosion, and decades of mismanagement. While allelopathy is conventionally understood as a form of “interference competition”, where plants deploy allelochemicals to inhibit neighbouring species and establish territorial dominance, often enabling invasive “novel weapons”, local actors rework, resist, and sometimes instrumentalise these dynamics in collaborative and conflicting ways. I refer to these experiments through the trope of non/assemblage of multi-species: unstable constellations of plants, chemicals, soils, infrastructures, and security regimes that exceed both ecological engineering and agrarian tradition. The paper argues that soil conservation in war-scarred borderlands is not a project of ecological restoration alone, but a political reassembly of life, competition, and coexistence beyond monocultures.