Overview
Ecologies of Violence uses archaeological, historical and ethnographic research as well as vitalist/‘more-than-human’ frameworks to critically investigate how landscapes remember past violence against both culture and nature, and how these social, material and biological scars persist in the contemporary world in the form of toxic landscapes, alongside varied attempts to regenerate them.
- The continuing impacts of the bombing of Laos during the CIA’s ‘Secret War (1964-1973), and ongoing consequences of demining activities on natural and cultural heritage in Laos. As part of this branch of research, we are collaborating with Article22, a New York-based social enterprise that works with artisans in Laos who recycle war materials and use them to make craft objects, as well as MAG (Mines Advisory Group), a non-profit demining organisation supporting people affected by mines and other unexploded ordinance in Laos, to understand how both nature and culture have been and continue to be shaped by the impact of exploded and unexploded ordinance. Led by PI Breithoff.
The continuing impacts of infrastructural projects undertaken during Stroessner’s dictatorship on natural and cultural heritage in Paraguay. Particular focus will be given to Ruta 9, considered a symbol of ‘progress’ and the country’s longest and most important highway. The project will be undertaken in collaboration with the Paraguayan Ministry of Culture and will aim to develop further collaborations with other government departments responsible for nature conservation in the region to explore the impacts of these infrastructural projects in the Chaco via the widespread clearance for agriculture, and the associated destruction of forests, Indigenous territory, flora and fauna. Led by PI Breithoff.
- A new case study, the ‘Zone Rouge’ — an area deemed too geographically and ecologically annihilated and contaminated for human occupation — will explore the impacts of the conservation and management of World War 1 military heritage on contemporary agricultural landscapes in France, and will allow the project to further develop these comparative perspectives in a European setting and to extend them to the Global North. This strand of research will be led by postdoctoral researcher Leonard in collaboration with The Durand Group and Veterans and Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC). Using her expertise in conflict forensics and environmental toxicity, Co-I Renshaw will provide support and training to both the PDRA and the PI in understanding the long-term and changing impacts of armed conflict on soil, vegetation, and topography over time.
Esther Breithoff, Principal Investigator
Esther Breithoff is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Archaeology and Heritage and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. She previously held postdoctoral positions at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Her research spans the fields of Contemporary Archaeology and Critical Heritage Studies and has ranged across a number of different topics — including war, natural and cultural heritage, nuclear and petroleum industries, dictatorships and biobanking — but traces a common set of interests in the relationships between conflicts, resources, recycling and rights across more-than-human worlds in the Anthropocene. She is the author of Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco: War at the End of the Worlds? (UCL Press) and a co-author of Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (UCL Press). She is co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCA).
Layla Renshaw, Co-Investigator
Layla Renshaw is a forensic archaeologist and Associate Professor in Forensic Science at Kingston University. Her research focuses on post-conflict investigations, and the relationship between human remains, material culture and traumatic memory. She has worked as an assistant archaeologist for the International Criminal Tribunal in Kosovo and participated in the investigation of WWII casualty sites in Germany and Italy. Layla has carried out fieldwork at multiple sites in Spain and is the author of Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. She has researched relatives’ experiences of the recovery of Anzac soldiers killed at the Battle of Fromelles, exploring the relationship between genetic identification, family history and memory. In 2019, she was principal investigation on the ISRF group project Citizen Forensics: Materializing the Dead from Grave to Gene. Layla is currently a co-convenor of a CRASSH-funded research network at Cambridge called Military Surplus: Industry, Toxicity and War (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/military-surplus-toxicity-industry-and-war), exploring the impact and legacies of military manufacturing from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Matthew Leonard, Postdoctoral Researcher
Matthew Leonard is an archaeologist and anthropologist of modern conflict and post-doctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. His work focuses on the human engagement with the subterranean landscapes of recent war. Matt is the current Chairman of the Durand Group http://durandgroup.org.uk and the Editor-in-Chief of the Western Front Association’s journal, Stand To!. He conducts regular fieldwork in France and Belgium and works closely with several associated organisations such as Veterans Affairs Canada and the CWGC.
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MAG
External link(Mines Advisory Group)
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Article22
External link(New York-based social enterprise working with women artisans in Laos)
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Legacies of War
External link(Educational and advocacy organization working to address the on-going impact of the American wars in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam)
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Ministerio de Cultura de la República del Paraguay
External link(Ministry of Culture, Paraguay)
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Durand Group
External link(organisation of First World War subterranean warfare specialists)
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VAC
External link(Veterans Affair Canada)
Workshop:
Birkbeck, University of London, April 20, 2023
Workshop organisers:
Esther Breithoff
(Birkbeck, University of London)
Layla Renshaw
(Kingston University)
Workshop participants:
- Lesley McFadyen
- Zsuzsanna Ihar
- Paola Filippucci
- Anne Hertzog
- Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
- Zuzanna Dziuban
- Ignasi Torrent
- Tim Cole
- Vron Ware
- Matthew Leonard
- Josephine Sweeney
- Jennifer Putnam
(Post)conflict ecologies: rethinking the afterlives of conflict and violence in more-than-human worlds
Armed conflict unleashes violence that is immediate, visible and calamitous, resulting in the death of humans and non-humans, and the destruction of cultural and natural heritage. But what about the less immediate effects of armed violence, those that linger and continue to affect people and landscapes, hinder social, economic and environmental development for years and maybe even centuries to come?
Focussing on (post)conflict human and non-human entanglements, this workshop invites cross-disciplinary consideration of the aftermath of armed conflict and its persistent effects on human/more-than-human ecologies after active fighting has ceased. With a focus on environmental harms and forms of toxicity, contributions might consider, the impacts of nuclear and petrochemical pollution, unexploded ordinance, displacement and forced migration, and intergenerational trauma on objects, people, plants, animals and landscapes.
Taking as a starting point Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” as “gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon2011, 2), we aim to consider and develop new conceptual and methodological approaches to the persistent aftermaths of conflict and its role in enforcing and maintaining environmental and social degradation and injustices within post-conflict settings. This engages with the call by Navaro et al.(2021) to bring more-than-human approaches to the study of political violence. Inviting perspectives from a wide range of disciplines including (but not limited to) anthropology, archaeology, art history, creative humanities, environmental humanities, extinction studies, forensic sciences, geography, heritage and museum studies, memory studies, history, science and technology studies and sociology, the workshop aims to explore questions of time, space, scale, ethics and responsibility in the afterlives of conflict, and how such approaches might inform the management of post-conflict legacies in the future.
Questions to explore include but are not limited to:
- How to work at the intersection of natural and cultural legacies of conflict?
- How the concept of ecologies, and the forms of interdependence it implies, offers a conceptual framework to blur human and non-human distinctions?
- How to incorporate scientific and technical knowledge of environments, materials, substances and processes such as decay or regeneration into the study of post-conflict legacies?
- How to work with complex materialities and intangible traces of conflict such as sound, air, somatic conditions or disease?
- How to work with communities experiencing natural and cultural legacies of conflict?
- How to encompass the differing temporalities of natural and cultural legacies of conflict? Is “slow violence” necessarily slow?
- How the theoretical framework of “slow violence” informs more-than-human approaches to colonialism and/or decolonisation by challenging notions of ethics, care, and responsibility?
- How do processes of regeneration and repair of the more-than-human world intersect with post-conflict healing and commemoration?
Structure
Participants were asked to come prepared to share their own insights relating to their particulardisciplinary and/or professional backgrounds and practices with each other in the workshop setting. We aim for a vibrant exploration of the theme mentioned above through a series of discussions and activities. In participating in theworkshop, we hope you will be able to helpfully unpack some of the values thatinform the practices with which you work, exchange ideas, engage with yourfellow participants, think imaginatively about the problems and ideas thatemerge, and work critically with the idea of the representation of the past inthe present for the future.
Background
This workshop was funded as part of the UKRI FLF funded projects Material Memories Archaeology, Heritage and Human Rights Violations in South America and Southeast Asia (MR/S016236/1) (2019-2023) that concerns the tangible traces of war and dictatorship in Paraguay and Laos, and Ecologies of Violence: Heritage and Conflict in More than Human Worlds (MR/X014991/1) (2023-2026), which investigates the lasting physical and ecological impacts of armed violence on natural as well as cultural environments in Paraguay, Laos and France.
