Tabitha Angela Spence

This project examines the “afterlives” of the War on Terror in Pakistan through the study of “local war economies.” Since the early 2000s, many local markets in Pakistan have relied on the “leakage” of commodities along NATO’s supply lines, channeling them into a vast trading network involving corruption, theft and profiteering. Despite NATO’s withdrawal from the region in 2021, the markets continue to sell excess material left behind by the US, articulating the intimate relationship between combat and commercial logistics, while also blurring the lines between war and peace in contemporary Pakistan. I focus my research on the Lakhi Dar market in Shikarpur, a historic trade hub in Pakistan’s Sindh province that became a critical nodal point for NATO logistics during the War on Terror. Today, NATO supplies continue to circulate and undergird processes of capital accumulation in the market. I investigate how market relations embedded in such local war economies simultaneously reveal and veil the long term consequences of imperial wars. Thus, this work aims to provide a new lens into the study of the War on Terror by highlighting the dynamic relationship between commodity flows and logistics, imperial war-making and waste in the global South.