Beyond ecocide? For an anthropology of war ecologies
David Henig
Warfare, regardless of time and place, has always devastated lives, landscapes, and entire ecologies. In recent years, ecocide has become an important frame for attending to the long-lasting aftermaths of wars. The concept first appeared in 1970 in connection with documenting the intentional destruction of the environment occurring as part of the wider Vietnam War. However, it later became dominated by legal debates over whether it should be declared an international crime that would carry force like those prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, and how such crimes should be documented. This lecture goes beyond these discursive framings of ecocide and instead looks at ethnographic instances of what living in places devastated by wars entails, and how human and nonhuman lives resist and regenerate amidst war-induced ecocidal assault and the degradation of life more broadly.
To make such a perspectival shift, the lecture will argue that ecocide needs to be approached alongside its twin concept: war ecology. While largely forgotten today, the two concepts share a common history. Building on this ecocide-war ecology nexus, the lecture will show how, in recent years, the idea of war ecology has become for anthropologists an analytical tool to study the entanglements of war and the environment. The idea of war ecology can shed light not only on the often overlooked toxic and explosive effects of war and their harmful, frequently multi-generational legacies, but also on their indeterminate futures. In doing so, the lecture will consider how an anthropology of war ecologies can help us think with and about ecocide in a more capacious, multi-scalar, and multi-temporal way.