Warzone Ecology: Iraq’s Marshes on the Battlegrounds of War examines the way in which the US government and allied foreign donors instrumentalized the reflooding and conservation of Iraq’s storied southern marshes to promote and profit from the war. It demonstrates how wetlands biodiversity conservation has been a key technology of war and occupation in Iraq. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the most concentrated period of which was conducted in 2006-2007, this ethnography follows Iraqi biologists, exiles, environmental institutions, foreign donors, and multinationals as they worked in marshlands restoration to advance their own, often contradictory, interests. When exiles suggested the reflooding and conservation of Iraq’s southern marshes as a priority of the occupation, the US government seized on the opportunity to market the war as a humanitarian effort that won not just hearts and minds, but environments too. This book is motivated by the questions: How is the concept of nature instrumental to war? What are the parameters of that discursive relationship? How is nature-making materially realized in wartime? Whereas scholars typically conceive of the wartime relationship with environments as one of toxicity and decay, the monograph shows how oil and water multinationals invested in the creation of ecological life as a strategy for natural resource extraction.

Image Credit: Muayad Muhsin, Another Road, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Adrift: Voyages of Discovery and Survival in the Mediterranean puts Guarasci’s great-grandfather’s mobility from the mines of Enna, Sicily to the quarries of Bizerte, Tunisia and across the seas to New York City in dialectical relationship to North African migrants who capsize and drown in the sea today as a result of Italy’s exclusionist policies. The book project analyzes how geography and racialization are mutually imbricated projects. It takes up the questions: Does the impact of human violence in making and gate-keeping geographic regions register geologically? How can ethnographic and archival research inform our understanding of geological change? The title Adrift names three inter-connected transformative movements in the Mediterranean. First, adrift signals archival erasure and the political strategies that strategically dislocate the present from the past. Second, adrift conveys a feeling of dislocation in the world that migrants commonly express as they move from one place to another while simultaneously re-evaluating who they are and what they can be in the world. Third, adrift references the activity of the ocean and especially its currents that propel ships or claim lives.

Image Credit: Guarasci Family Photo, Tunis, 1910s

Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars, this scholarly intervention with Sarah Vaughn and Amelia Moore suggests “intersectional ecologies” as a method for critically engaging anthropology’s relationship with the environment across subfields, intellectual traditions, and authorial politics. Intersectional ecologies helps us trace how a broad coalition of scholars represents and accounts for the environment within shifting planetary arrangements of bodies, sites, practices, and technologies. Intersectional ecologies stems from the premise that the environment is a malleable and contingent social fact and it matters who is analyzing its formation and how they are analyzing it. This project includes the publication of our Citation Matters Syllabus and our 2021 article in the Annual Review of Anthropology.

Image Credit: Cypress Swamp near Summerville, South Carolina, Marion Post Wolcott for the US Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information, 1938. Courtesy of the US Library of Congress.

Ecologies of War is a series of essays co-edited with Eleana Kim for the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Theorizing the Contemporary project. Collectively, essays in the series ask how the material, affective, and social manifestations of power produce ecologies, which are, in turn, inextricable from the violence, toxicity, desire, and domination of war. Ecologies of war greatly expands how scholars conceptualize war by shifting from anthropology’s current focus from soldiering or displacement, both of which conceptualize the violence of war as brute force, to networks of material, social, technological and technocratic relations, paying careful attention to the violence caused by pastoral forms of power designed to caretake in the wake of political brutality or climatic uncertainty.

Image credit: white mesa burden, Teresa Montoya, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Representations of Iraq in mainstream media depict it as a site marked by war and irreparable destruction, rather than as a barometer of global processes that reveal how contemporary crises of liveability are connected. Iraq Unruled is a co-edited volume with Zainab Saleh and Haytham Bahoora that brings together scholars whose ethnographic and archival research situates Iraq as a site from which to examine the broader socio-political questions of economy, governance, and sustainability that refract global crises.

Image credit: Hanaa Malallah, Happened in the Dawn, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.