LLC39: War Ecologies

Collaborative Goals

The majority of literature on wars and postwar societies understandably focuses on the horrific aspects of war, such as death, destruction, displacement, and trauma. Our working group--composed of four faculty members from Syracuse University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester--aims to broaden this focus and turn our attention to "war ecologies." More specifically, we propose to think beyond "war itself" to pay attention to "forms of war that are often unrecognized as such--in everyday experiences, material effects, and affective resonances of violence that have penetrated and contaminated the environments and ecologies of places." (citation)

Our working group will zoom into complex (post)war ecologies in Rwanda, Kashmir, and Bosnia--places where we work--to examine war's ecological entanglements and reverberations. In order to do so, we will ask the following questions: What is the relationship between "war" and "nature"? How and in what way do experiences of war reverberate in injured, postwar landscapes? What can we learn about war and postwar societies by paying attention to various non-human others - species and infrastructures - that have long shaped experiences of "war" and "postwar"? And how are "ecology," "nature" and "infrastructure" emerging as new repositors of both "capture" (of bodies, life projects, energy, and futures) and political imagination (hope, desire, and citizenship)? We propose to examine these questions, and to think, read and write together--to collaborate--so that we can offer an overtly anthropological approach to vital entanglements and reverberations of wars and ecologies.