Kali Rubaii

KALI RUBAII, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, was awarded a Hunt Post-doctoral Fellowship in October 2021 to aid research and writing on “Counter-resurgency: Iraq’s Ecologies of Coercion.” In Iraq, the War on Terror includes not only the initial shock of war, but also the incapacitation of recovery from that shock through subtle modes of coercion that curtail popular uprising and erode social and physical environments. Counter-resurgency approaches militarism as a landscape-altering project that manifests chronic anthropogenic hazard. This book documents how displaced farmers from Anbar province navigate newly militarized arrangements among humans, plants, objects, and chemical substances to repair their land. Through careful attention to the way people read and interact with their surroundings, this ethnography captures the atmospherics of everyday life on a warscape and the ethical frames through which people read and navigate their world.