Presentation short abstract

Combining political ecology, peace geographies, and Deleuzian ideas of the tree and rhizome, this presentation analyzes war as a generative socio-ecological system. It highlights how humans and nonhumans co-produce assemblages which shape postwar ecologies, power relations, and everyday life.

Presentation long abstract

The violent legacies of war are not residual: they are generative. This is exemplified in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s mined landscapes, where wartime logics and ecologies continue to shape human and nonhuman ways of living, moving, and surviving. Such dynamics reveal deeper questions that demand explanation: Why does violence persist after war’s formal conclusion? What are the human and more-than-human forces which sustain it across time? And, in such contexts, what does “peace” become when violence refuses to end?

Through ethnographic research conducted in Bosnia on landmine clearance and postwar reconstruction, this presentation examines the socio-ecological assemblages produced by war, tracing how they transform lives and landscapes for generations after war’s formal end. Combining political ecology, peace geographies, and Deleuzian concepts of the tree and rhizome, I illustrate how war creates both deeply rooted, path-dependent structures of living and unpredictable, diffuse socio-ecological entanglements. The resultant web of relations challenges linear narratives of “postwar transition” by showing how violence persists through dynamic interactions among humans, nonhumans, and institutions. I trace how these assemblages shape ecologies, power relations, and everyday life.

In doing so, I move beyond dominant resource-oriented approaches to political ecology and toward a framework that accounts for the full system of war: its pre-existing vulnerabilities, its wartime arrangements, and the legacies embedded in its aftermath. Practically, this work argues that we must integrate environmental concerns into the core of peacebuilding rather than allow them to remain at the periphery, as recovery is inseparable from the landscapes through which violence persists.