SESSION TITLE: War and the Earth
AAG Annual Meeting 16-20 April 2024 (LINK)
ORGANISERS: Kali Rubaii (Purdue), Henry Redwood (KCL), Mark Griffiths (Newcastle)
As we learn more about the ecological, climatic, and epidemiological effects of war, papers in this session will consider ways of building knowledge of war from the perspective of the Earth and the life it sustains. How does war look from the perspective of the Earth? Why build such perspectives? And how (empirically) can we do so? Contributions are thus invited that build around current work in international relations and cognate fields on, for example, the carbon costs of war logistics (Belcher et al. 2020; Crawford 2022); the toxic emissions of military disposal practices (Rubaii 2022); collaborations and tensions between conservation actors and military training grounds and bases (Ware 2022); the acceleration of mineral extraction in an era of technologically advanced weaponry (Griffiths & Rubaii, forthcoming); the long-term health effects of living in post-war landscapes for human (Griffiths 2022; Nixon 2011; Leep 2022) and non-human (Pugliese 2020) populations. Through this recent work, war appears in new spatial and temporal terms, it extends beyond the declaration of “operations” into an environmental aftermath, and often also into a “beforemath” of mining, manufacturing, and transportation.
This is a productive time for scholars engaged in better understanding the ways that war affects the Earth, especially in a context of advanced military technologies and vast logistical networks. War is perhaps now more than ever based on an extractive and damaging relationship with our planet, explicating these relations presents new sites of knowledge production and critique. We thus invite abstracts of ~250 words that address the following themes (this is not an exhaustive list):
- Technological critical minerals and arms production
- Heavy metals in post-war contexts
- Military burnpits and clean up
- Concrete military landscapes
- Greening the arms trade / militaries
- Health and military heavy metals
- Ecologies of weapons testing grounds
- Indigenous, anti-colonial, ecologies and war
- Conservation and militarism
- Agriculture in war’s aftermaths
- Logistics and climate change
- The environmental “beforemaths” of war
- Environmental activism and anti-militarist resistance
- Law and ecological warfare
Please email Kali Rubaii, Henry Redwood and Mark Griffiths by 10 Nov with a title and abstract (~250 words): kali.rubaii@gmail.com, henry.redwood@kcl.ac.uk and mark.griffiths@ncl.ac.uk. Be in touch with questions.