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Paper short abstract:

By following the labors of Iraqi scientists to make the marshes a national park and World Heritage site, this paper explores how the violence of the Iraq war was realized each day in the lab work and fieldwork of Iraqi biologists, where scientists regularly negotiated both moral and mortal distress.

Paper long abstract:

To produce heritage in post-Ba'ath, occupied Iraq, biology was critical. Iraqi exiles, the UN, and US sought to restore and conserve Iraq's wetlands—drained by Saddam Hussein—as the country's first national park and a designated World Heritage cultural landscape. There was one problem: given the scope of violence in Iraq, conducting biological fieldwork in the wetlands was almost impossible. Based on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how Iraqi marsh conservationists learned to craft marsh heritage by subjugating their personal research dilemmas and practical concerns for safety, facing challenges to nurture ecological life while working in an institutional framework that seemed to care comparatively little for human life. UN experts adapted remote sensing technologies to the context of war; biological discriminations would be made by studying pixels not plants. Iraqi remote sensing scientists confronted project limitations—faulty data, lack of political will inside the country, inadequate donor funding, and, most of all, the "security situation," which, as employees of an organization associated inside Iraq with the occupation, they confronted on a daily basis. By following the labors of Iraqi scientists to make the marshes a national park and World Heritage site, this paper explores how the violence of the Iraq war was realized each day in the lab work and fieldwork of Iraqi biologists, where scientists regularly negotiated both moral and mortal distress.