Presentation short abstract

This paper addresses the multiplicity, duration, and complexity of wartime ecological and health-related harms through the lens of affective injustice. It draws on interview testimony with civilians living and working on the front lines of ecocide and toxic war ecologies in Palestine and Iraq.

Presentation long abstract

This paper addresses the multiplicity, duration, and complexity of wartime harm, focusing on ecologies of war and their intertwined impacts on the natural environment and human health. Methodologically, we draw on interview testimony with civilians living and working on the front lines of ecocide and toxic war ecologies in Palestine and Iraq. We argue that the measurement and quantification of harm by various actors in recent decades has been a necessary but insufficient step toward understanding the scope, scale and spatialities of diverse ecological harms. We employ the lens of epistemic injustice to help identify how wartime experiences, evidence, and testimony of those harmed is repeatedly depreciated, and marginalized, revealing nonaccidental connections military powers and the patterns of harm they produce and license. Building on this work, we introduce and amplify the concept of ‘affective injustice,’ that is the burden of having to negotiate not only the marginalization of one’s knowledge, but also the devaluation and manipulation of the emotional state of knowing and experiencing ones’ harm which is rendered inadmissible except in the disjunctive terms of ‘appropriate’ affect. This is a ‘double bind’ of injustice that overly burdens as it means that those who seek to articulate harm, are forced to expend the efforts to register in an epistemic and affective structure which negates through relations and terms that diminishes their capacity, authority, and possibility to do so.