WTMC Summer School – ‘The afterlives of ecocide: ecological relations in times of war’

War has and continues to be waged not only on people but on environments and ecologies. Examples abound for how ecological destruction has been used as a weapon in violent conflict and suppression, sometimes under the veil of modernization and development – think, for instance, of German colonial officers poisoning sources of water in the Namibian desert, the US military dropping Agent Orange on the rainforests of Vietnam, the Israeli Defense Forces bombing orchards and greenhouses, but also of the ruinous and lethal effects of government-sponsored megadams or of colonial-era plantation systems and modern monocultures. In their multifaceted mobilizations (of force, knowledge, surveillance, resources, emergencies), war efforts also impact environments and ecologies through, for example, waste, pollution, carceral geographies or the killing of environmental defenders. At the same time, the material, legal, social and ideological frameworks of war and security are used to frame and act on many modern problems – from drug addiction and poverty to pandemics, terrorism, species extinction and migration. In this summer school, we want to explore what it means to approach war as a feature of modernity; that is, not as an exception but a structural and structuring condition of the modern world. We suggest thinking of such “endless war” as entwined with historical and ongoing imperialist violence and steeped within rhetorics of beneficence that promise salvation and a return to better futures. We also understand the notion of war beyond a narrow political definition in order to consider the sanctioned use of large-scale organized violence against all conditions of life.

The structural nature of war prompts us to reckon with the fact that weapons of war do not lose their destructive potential after they have been laid down, after the signing of peace accords or surrender. Landmines litter landscapes and tear off limbs decades after they have been placed. Toxic substances from weapons or pharmaceutical drug manufacturing continue poisoning soils. Meanwhile, fine particulate matter generated by the pulverisation of neighbourhoods settles in the lungs of survivors and their children. War on ecologies – ecocide – ensures casualties well past the official end to military campaigns and emergencies. And once “war” has been chosen as the key metaphor for relating to issues, its logic will perpetuate the production of marked and unmarked “enemies” and their ecological relations. Processes of militarization will take hold of both, public and domestic spaces and seek to optimize infrastructures, institutions (including universities), households and bodies for what Jennifer Terry (2017) has called “a continual state of attachment to war”.

The notion of ecocide prompts questions pertaining to the basic categories by which we understand and reckon with war and, by extension, peace: If the killing continues, what distinguishes peacetime from wartime? What happens to the category of the “civilian” in the context of an ecocide? How does an ecocide challenge our understanding of “weapons”, “weapons of mass destruction” and of the “military industry” that produces these weapons (e.g. what substances, materials, technologies, etc. need to be embargoed in cases of ecocide?). What happens to the (legal, discursive, physical, metabolic) limits of bodies (of people, of states, of rivers etc.) when ecocidal violence is enacted? How does our understanding and recognition of environments change when we look for the traces and ongoing aftermaths of war and atrocities in and on them? How does sustained violence inscribe itself into ecologies, landscapes and bodies? How might trauma be part of the topography of a region or the structure of an institution? And what emerging repertoires of action and modes of restoration may be rendered (in)visible by the metaphor of ‘war’?

This summer schools wants to problematize the ubiquity of war by attending to its effects on and in ecologies and environments. Doing so, it seeks to understand how war and militarization shape and re-shape objects, concepts and (institutional) contexts that inhabit the worlds which STS commonly studies including hospitals, laboratories, multispecies assemblages, infrastructures, medicine, biotechnology. Drawing on perspectives from the history of science, anthropology, and environmental humanities, we want to collectively think with and probe the notion of “ecocide” to account for the many forms of life and forms of living obliterated and/or deemed killable and sacrificial in conditions of war.

The anchor teachers for this summer school are:

Tahani Nadim is research professor of ‘Curating Digital Objects of Cultural Knowledge and Memory’ at the Institute of Art History of Ruhr University Bochum.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an associate professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.