Bridget Guarasci

We will gather twenty-four anthropologists over three days to collectively theorize Ecologies of War. The contemporary world is saturated by war and militarization. We ask how the material, affective, and social manifestations of power produce ecologies, which are, in turn, inextricable from the violence, toxicity, affects, and domination of war. Scholars will develop a method of analysis for violence that has until now remained below the threshold of articulation, making war and nature appear distinct rather than inextricable projects of harnessing the biosphere. As the fires burning from military battles and the fires burning from climate crisis both intensify, we bring ethnographic attention to sites in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas where explosive wars, perpetual wars, never-ending wars, and peacelessness of political enmity endure, creating experiential, material, affective, and ecological effects. We bring an explicitly anthropological approach to what we view as essential entanglements of wars and ecologies, encompassing scales and temporalities that extend above and below the sites of conflict. This workshop is one part of a larger initiative that will produce an edited volume, a free two-hour digital webinar on ethnographic praxis, a collaborative syllabus, and conference presentations over the next two years.