LLC39: War Ecologies

Collaborative Goals

The majority of literature on wars and postwar societies understandably focuses on the horrific aspects of warfare, such as death, destruction, and trauma. Our working group--composed of five faculty members from Syracuse University, Cornell University, the University of Rochester, and the Rochester Institute of Technology--aims to broaden this focus and turn our attention to war and post-war ecologies. We come together to examine "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 comparatively and collaboratively explores post/war ecologies in Rwanda, Kashmir, Bosnia, Nigeria and Kuwait --places where we conduct research-- examining war's ecological entanglements and reverberations. We ask the following questions: How and in what way do experiences of war and post-war capitalism reverberate in injured, postwar landscapes? What can we learn about war and postwar societies by paying attention to various non-human others – species, geologies, and infrastructures - that reshape societies and landscapes? What do the war and post-war ecologies tell us about our connections across borders and continents? And how does ecology emerge as a new repository of both capture (of bodies, life projects, energy, labor, and futures) and political imagination (hope, desire, and citizenship)? We examine these questions, and think, read, and write together so that we can offer an anthropological approach to some of the most pressing questions of our time.