Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 4:30pm to 6:00pm - in person at CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA
War and "Geos": The Aftermaths and Beforemaths of Late Modern War
The CMES Disaster Studies Initiative is pleased to present Mark Grifitths, Reader in Political Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University (UK)
This paper considers war-earth relations by journeying from the aftermaths of late modern war – bombed-out landscapes, depleted ecosystems, and public health crises – to the “beforemaths”, spaces that are under-studied yet instrumental in the preparatory phases of recent assaults by advanced militaries. At the targets of those assaults – e.g., Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq – military operations carried out by US-led coalitions and Israel have left harmful residues in the landscape, typically the heavy metals of munitions that seep and leach in the earth. Those metals are, of course, extracted from the earth, often at similar cost to ecological and human health. For instance, weapons companies source raw materials from the DRC and Rwanda where mining communities are subject to similar patterns of long-term harm as those in Gaza and Iraq. This is a beforemath of war, a site of military violence that reveals a doubly destructive relation between war and earth where practices of extracting and depositing minerals distribute widespread violence across large tracts of the planet.
Mark Griffiths is Reader in Political Geography in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University (UK). His work on colonial and military power, with a specific focus on Palestine, is published in a range of journals including Progress in "Human Geography", "Society & Space", "International Political Sociology" and "Security Dialogue". He is editor of "Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence" (with Mikko Joronen, Tampere University), published by University of Nebraska Press in 2023, and his monograph, "Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine", will be published by University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Dr Griffiths is PI on the 5-year (2023-2028) UKRI Horizon Europe-funded project, "War and Geos: the environmental legacies of militarism"
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